I’ve a few old jumpers (aka sweaters, pullovers, woolly warm things) that aren’t really suitable for wearing any more by me or anyone else. I’ve either shrunk them a bit in the wash, or they’re stretched and baggy, or are stained in parts or are, frankly, a bit stinky in (under arm) parts.

I know that you can unpick old jumpers for their wool – but only if they’ve been knitted as a jumper, not if the different parts have been just cut from one big piece of cloth and (I forget the right term for it) kinda stuck together at the sides – if you unpick tops like that, you just get thousands of little pieces of wool, just one row in length rather than one piece of very long wool. Unfortunately all the woolies in question are of the latter, unpickable variety.

So given they’re not really any good for going charity-shop-ward and I can’t unpick them to feed my newfound knitting addiction, any other suggestions of things I can do with the cloth? Some of them have sleeves that are ok but the bodies are too far gone; on others the bodies are fine but the armpits and cuffs matted – so any suggestions for using up the different bits of them?

(Photo by fugue)