Here's something you might be interested in.
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed
Big Screen — Movie commentary
Blurt — Music's inside track
Booze News — San Diego spirits
Classical Music — Immortal beauty
Classifieds — Free and easy
Cover Stories — Front-page features
Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes
Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts
Feast! — Food & drink reviews
Feature Stories — Local news & stories
Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore
From the Archives — Spotlight on the past
Golden Dreams — Talk of the town
The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it
Letters — Our inbox
Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites
Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans
Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists
Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news
News Ticker — News & politics
Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated
Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna
Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated
Poetry — The old and the new
Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers
Reading — The hunt for intellectuals
Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails
San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds
SD on the QT — Almost factual news
Sheep and Goats — Places of worship
Special Issues — The best of
Street Style — San Diego streets have style
Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves
Theater — On stage in San Diego this week
Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative
Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work
Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego
Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads
Your Week — Daily event picks
50% wool, 50% dryer lint, all hand loomed
Hey Matt:
If I were to go to all the laundromats in San Diego County and collect all of the lint from the dryers, would I be able to make it into articles of clothing or does the material physically change property?
-- Fashion Conscious in Clairemont
Hankering for a hand-loomed lint sweater? Cool. In that universal vacuum-cleaner-bag-dirt gray color, right? Oh, actually, I hope you weren't planning on knitting some for Christmas gifts. A little late for '04. But for '05, you're all set. So gather up your lint-picking equipment while we explain the situation. We dialed up spinmaster Lorraine Powell of Back Country Spinners in Ramona. Lorraine suggests that pretty much anything stringy can be spun into a yarn, and that would include dryer lint, the little cotton wads in the tops of aspirin bottles, and pet hair. Lint is just free-range fuzz scraped off our clothes, so why couldn't we recycle it into new duds?
The easiest fiber to spin, apparently, is wool, because each strand is a column of overlapping scales, like a human hair, that lock into one another as they are twisted and spun into a thread. That makes a nice strong yarn that's easy to handle. Something like polyester has no scale surface, so it's trickier to work with, and you generally need to twist it very tightly as you spin it, then make a two- or three-ply thread out of it to have enough bulk and strength in the finished product. Dryer lint is a jumble of the scaly and the slick, so other than being made up of tiny bits that would be hard to work with, it would make a so-so yarn. Lorraine suggests carding the lint before you spin, maybe, to get all the random bits going in the same direction and to clean out paper shreds and other pocket junk that ends up in lint traps. And I gather she speaks from experience when she says you can spin golden retriever yarn from your sweet, dopey-faced pet; and you can knit a golden retriever sweater from that yarn; but it will probably always smell like golden retriever-- so spin it, knit it, put it back on dog.
Here's something you might be interested in.
50% wool, 50% dryer lint, all hand loomed
50% wool, 50% dryer lint, all hand loomed
Hey Matt:
If I were to go to all the laundromats in San Diego County and collect all of the lint from the dryers, would I be able to make it into articles of clothing or does the material physically change property?
-- Fashion Conscious in Clairemont
Hankering for a hand-loomed lint sweater? Cool. In that universal vacuum-cleaner-bag-dirt gray color, right? Oh, actually, I hope you weren't planning on knitting some for Christmas gifts. A little late for '04. But for '05, you're all set. So gather up your lint-picking equipment while we explain the situation. We dialed up spinmaster Lorraine Powell of Back Country Spinners in Ramona. Lorraine suggests that pretty much anything stringy can be spun into a yarn, and that would include dryer lint, the little cotton wads in the tops of aspirin bottles, and pet hair. Lint is just free-range fuzz scraped off our clothes, so why couldn't we recycle it into new duds?
The easiest fiber to spin, apparently, is wool, because each strand is a column of overlapping scales, like a human hair, that lock into one another as they are twisted and spun into a thread. That makes a nice strong yarn that's easy to handle. Something like polyester has no scale surface, so it's trickier to work with, and you generally need to twist it very tightly as you spin it, then make a two- or three-ply thread out of it to have enough bulk and strength in the finished product. Dryer lint is a jumble of the scaly and the slick, so other than being made up of tiny bits that would be hard to work with, it would make a so-so yarn. Lorraine suggests carding the lint before you spin, maybe, to get all the random bits going in the same direction and to clean out paper shreds and other pocket junk that ends up in lint traps. And I gather she speaks from experience when she says you can spin golden retriever yarn from your sweet, dopey-faced pet; and you can knit a golden retriever sweater from that yarn; but it will probably always smell like golden retriever-- so spin it, knit it, put it back on dog.
Comments