woolies!

I don't think my great-grandma ever heard the term "upcycle" but I think she would have liked it. While I may not look much like that particular grandma, I definitely inherited her frugalness (it's frugal people not cheap). And as an ecological bonus, upcycling means I can get new stuff cheap and with very little environmental impact which are the 2 reasons that we're cloth diapering the kidlet.

To date we've been pretty simple with our diapers- prefolds (those square diapers with more fabric in the middle) and wrap covers. But I've been reading breathless, fawning reviews about wool and fleece covers. Basically the cotton diaper absorbs the liquid and the natural water repelling tendencies of wool or fleece keeps that moisture from getting onto the bed or my pants. I was skeptical but tried putting him in fleece pjs in just a diaper, no cover and was really impressed. Kidlet hasn't had any diaper rash and using the most breathable cover possible should keep that streak alive. So, I took the plunge and got some wool sweaters from the salvation army to turn into diaper covers. I'll make some diaper soakers in the future but I decided to start off making wool longies (pants) out of the sleeves of my recycled sweaters.

Close up of sweater before I felted it nearly out of existence


I should have taken a picture to show how big this sweater was before felting but I was just too excited to get the felting started. and the sweater kind of stunk so I wanted to get it washed. Anyway here's the sweater after felting-it went from a very large mens XXL to a weird shaped womens small.


Look how thick this material is now. I was afraid it would kill my sewing machine.


I cut off the sleeves and used a pair of kidlet's pants as a pattern guide. It's just an optical illusion that one sleeve/leg is much wider and shorter.


Standard pants crotch sewing-put right sides together one leg inside the other and sew. I used a zigzag stitch just to make sure that it wouldn't unravel but seriously this sweater has been turned to felt, it's no longer a knit.




Use the hem of the sweater as the waist band of the longies


And they're done


Yesterday I made 2 more pairs of longies out of 2 more upcycled sweaters. The orange pair is from a 100% merino sweater that I also felted a bit more than I wanted. I added a diamond shaped crotch gusset because the legs are pretty skinny and not streatchy. The blue longies are from an 80% wool 20% acrylic sweater that I abused along with the orange and purple sweaters but it didn't felt nearly as much. That pair is nice and stretchy and not too thick. It was the easiest to make-I think it took me less than half an hour to make that one. I made these pretty big so they are longies now but the waist size should be big enough that kidlet can wear these for quite a while.


We've tried both the purple and blue longies overnight with no leaks. And the beauty of wool is it doesn't need to be washed after every use, as long as it's not poopy or stinky it just needs to be air dried between uses.