🎼Retro-post, retro-post. Post whatever, a retro post.🎶

For producer Amy's birthday this year, we went to one of her favorite places: Fab Scrap!

Fab Scrap helps fashion brands divert pre-consumer waste to be recycled or resold. Fashion companies send them literal tons of stuff that needs to be sorted into what can be resold, what can be shredded, what's recyclable, and what's trash.

The perfect birthday activity? Doing a three-hour volunteer sorting session together. Afterwards, they let you take home up to 5 pounds of scrap from your own sorting or from their resale store. And 30% off items that are sold individually!

Amy picked out a bunch of fabric goodies for her sewing projects, but I only had eyes for yarn. These are sold on cones, sometimes multiple pounds, in a pretty weird variety of materials and colors. I'm probably never going to find a fancy-schmancy merino wool, but there are some pretty neat cotton and synthetic blends in interesting colors and textures. They're already pretty affordable as-labeled, but at 30% off, it feels like a steal!

So, I filled up a bag and hauled a bunch home!

Before I can really make anything with these, I need to practice with them on the machine, find the right tension to work with them, and so on. So, it was time to make a bunch of tension swatches.

From left-to-right:

• A very fine dark blue, synthetic blend. This yarn is too thin to use single-ply, so I wound off a small sample and threaded in two strands. Even then, it knit at a very small stitch size. The swatch here is 40 stitches wide, with two sections of 50 rows each. One at tension T2 and one at T3. The stitch count is the same as the samples next to this one, but this fine stretchy yarn comes out quite small! I will probably try this in three or four ply, or combine it with another thin yarn, before planning a project with it.
• Neon pink cotton-synthetic blend. Nice and fuzzy! This needed to be knit at a much larger stitch size. This swatch is the same 40 stitches wide, with 3 sections of about 50 rows each, at T7, T8, and T9. It's so pink! I'll probably use it for accent colors unless I come up with some absolutely ridiculous project.
• In the middle is a red acrylic yarn. It's slightly thinner and easier to work with than the fuzzy stuff. This swatch was made the same way as the pink swatch. It's a real red's red.
• Next up, and this lighting doesn't do it justice, is a swatch of purple. This is a synthetic blend, that's very dense and not very stretchy. I made this swatch with the same 40 stitches and 3 sections of 50 rows. Suitable for Grimace cosplay, probably.
• Finally, the largest swatch is a neon safety-vest yellow swatch. This is bigger than the others because it's actually 50 stitches wide, and I did it in 4 tensions, from (I think) 7 to 10. Suitable for Big Bird cosplay, probably!

We learned that Fab Scrap would be hosting some special tours and sorting sessions for Martin Luther King Jr. day. So, of course, we signed up to return. I was a little more picky this time.

On the left here is a bright safety-vest orange in my favorite fuzzy cotton-synthetic blend. On the right is a two-stranded blend of blue-green and white, also a cotton blend I think. Both swatches are 40 stitches with 3 sections of 50 rows each, at tensions T7, T8, and T9. The blue-green-white one was pretty painful to work with, and I dropped a bunch of stitches in the final section of the swatch. Thankfully it's just a swatch, so I was able to pick them up and work them into a section of waste yarn.

Not pictured here is another very fine synthetic yarn, this one in light blue. I want to try this one three- or four-ply, maybe blended with the dark blue yarn from my first haul!

Since these were all cotton and/or synthetics, I simply ran these through a machine wash and dry cycle on delicate. They haven't been pressed or steamed, so this is how they roll after drying.

I should maybe plan to practice and swatch more than just plain stockinette with each yarn. Samples of ribbing and fair isle might save some time when considering which yarns might be good for project ideas. Then again, they might not be! Each project has its own needs, and I should be prepared to spend the time and materials experimenting to find combinations that work for each one.

A lot of these yarns are on the thicc side for my setup - a standard gauge machine with needles spaced 4.5mm apart. This leads to a paradox where I have a bunch of yarn, but a lot of the projects I see out in the world are not really designed for these materials. I let this intimidate me more than I probably should. I can't help feeling that if I had more experience I would know better how these different yarns would produce different outcomes, or maybe that it was a mistake to purchase these.

But I don't know better, so I'm going to learn! Here's to putting these to good use!