take two

well...nothing is as easy as it seems at first. It seems that I was engaging in some wishful thinking when I read the label of the sweater that said 70% wool, 20% mohair, and 10% nylon. I was thinking that perhaps the 10% nylon referred to the band of fabric knit from a narrower yarn which formed the collar of my thrifted sweater, and not a percentage of nylon present in the yarn that makes up the entire sweater. I unraveled most of both sleeves until the yarn broke and I threw one cuff in the washer to see if it would felt. It wouldn't. It got a little bit shorter, but aside from that it seems perfectly machine abusable. The yarn also untwisted into a flimsy four parallel strands. My recycling enthusiasm went too far here, as I realize that the sweater probably would have made a better sweater as was than as is. At least I can use the handfuls of sweater ramen that I gathered for some Kool-Aid testing, since my first time dying yarn will surely not be as easy as I expect. Plus, I think I need to get a nice brown to compliment Edie's blue and purple stocking. There is no brown flavored Kool-Aid so I'll have to muddle some flavors together until they make poop soup.

The good news is that the perfect sweater sent me a mental telegram today, asking me to please come and pick her up from the thrift store. I dragged Kenneth and the baby out of the house, and Kenneth helped me sift through all the 100% acrylic sweaters until he got bored and wandered off into the baby clothes. I found two mens sweaters made of 100% lambswool, too fine to unravel but perfect for felting. I can use the felted sweaters to make something like this or whatever. Edie has an adorable dress made from a felted purple sweater that I found at Lily Toad in St. John's. Then I found the perfect sweater. 100% wool, chunky enough to see every stitch, hand knitted and seamed, and well loved by somebody who knew how to treat a sweater. It wasn't until I was happily unraveling one of the sleeves that I felt a pang of guilt - the sweater was well crafted, with bobbles and cables and panels of moss stitch and wooden buttons and ribbing. Who am I to say that Edie's first Christmas stocking is worth more than all that hard work? Actually, I rescued it from the thrift store for four dollars and I knew where not to cut this time and so I guess it is up to me to decide that this wool is done being a sweater and ready to become a holiday tradition. It's just that from the smell of things (smells just like my mom's old doll clothes that I used to love playing with), the sweater has been a sweater for a long long time. Life goes on. It really does! As I was pulling the crispy loops out of one another, it occured to me that the sheep who gave its coat to make this coat has been dead a very long time. How amazing that a piece of that sheep's life can live on in a sweater, and then change color and become a stocking (and probably some toys too, since one sleeve is about all I need for the stocking) long after the sheep itself has been repurposed into somebody's dinner, and that somebody probably also has become something else by now. I wonder what things will outlive me?