Rowan’s latest yarn is Purelife Revive, which is made from 36% recycled silk, 36% recycled cotton, and 28% recycled viscose.
Rowan Purelife Revive is made from used garments which have been selected according to the silk, cotton and viscose content. These are then carded to make regenerated fibre, which is then spun into this beautiful, high quality yarn, which gives life to new hand knitting designs.
Did you really NEED another reason to love Rowan more?
The Mother Nature Network has a review of Ann Budd’s new knitting book “Knitting Green.”
Knitting Green goes into solutions, highlighting eco-friendlier choices people can knit together using the many new greener yarns now on the market. Patterns range from the Back-to-Nature Hat made with organic O-Wool, an all-North-American hoodie made with wool that’s grown, harvested, and processed, in the U.S — and for the really crunchy knitters, soap nut vessels for the laundry, knit with hemp yarn.
I’m impressed Budd worked soap nuts into her patterns! Way to represent for the eco crowd! Soap nuts are awesome!
Unifi Inc. has just announced their new Repreve yarn, a 100% recycled yarn made from post-consumer and pre-consumer waste.
“Research shows it’s not just about recycling post-consumer waste. Behind every mound of post-consumer waste is a mountain of pre-consumer waste. And Unifi uses both to make Repreve.”
Repreve appears to be aimed at the industrial textile market, but it’s an interesting sign of things to come.
Acrylic yarn has traditionally been considered the “cheap” yarn, but with petroleum prices on the rise, it’s only a matter of time before Red Heart’s prices start rising quickly. Once the price rises for “virgin” acrylic yarn, recycled yarn looks like the most likely contender to fill that niche in the marketplace.
Horizonte Textil, a Brazilian textile company which produces woven fabric, has something that will make Al Gore smile. Their new Lona PET fabric is woven from a blend of recycled cotton and polyester from recycled PET plastic.
In the United States, consumers primarily see PET plastic in soda bottles (plastic 1).
No word yet on whether PET plastic yarn will be available to the hand-knitting market. (I mean, not that I can tell, anyway. Anyone speak Brazilian? Their site is all JPGs in a Flash interface, so I can’t run it through the Google Translator.)
I imagine this would make an excellent substitution for acrylic, both 100% acrylic yarn and acrylic blends. [via]