Waste not…

We are so wasteful… we have lost or never had the skills which our mothers and grandmothers had to use and reuse, to mend and repair. We buy cheap clothes (ignoring our conscience pricks about the workers who made them and the wages and conditions they must be working under) and if they become worn or torn we throw them away.

I came across a delightful old knitting book the other day, and as well as lots of knitting pattens, Knitting For All by Margaret Murray and Jane Koster, published some time in the 1940’s by Odham’s. This is what they advise about re-knitting garments:

When a garment has been worn for some time and holes have appeared in the elbows or elsewhere, instead of mending, which is often unsightly, unpick the seams carefully and unravel the yarn. Join the broken ends together and make into two skeins, then wash the skeins.
When re-knitting used wool, decide first if there is enough wool to make the garment. It is not enough to think that if it made a garment before it will again.
The best way is to work the back of the garment, then the front to the sleeve shaping, and then the sleeves. In this way you will be able to make the yoke in a contrasting colour or in stripes if your wool runs out and so save yourself the exasperation of wasted labour.
As a rule, garments made of bouclé or angora yarns cannot be un picked and it is better to cut and machine a child’s garments from the good parts.
Yarn generally becomes thinner in wear, so that it is more important to make a tension sample as it by no means follows that a 4-ply yarn re-knitted will produce the same size garment as when it was new.
There is no need to waste even the smallest length of wool – use it for making blanket squares – 4in. squares knitted in a simple stitch and sewn together.

I would never do this… I’m not good enough at knitting; but having had the waste not, want not mantra drummed into me, i do find it very difficult to throw things away, including clothes which are badly worn or no longer fit!