Frugal Fridays: Dirt Cheap Yarn

Admittedly, I am not a knitter. But, I recently heard a fantastic story from my college roommate, who was visiting with her husband. Apparently my roommate's mother-in-law peruses the racks at a deep-discount retailer which sells imperfect or security-ink-stained clothing; essentially one level below the likes of Ross or TJMaxx. She is not shopping for clothing - she's shopping for yarn in the clothing racks.

Since size or small imperfections are no hurdles, she can pick up knit sweaters for pennies on the dollar, whereupon she returns home and unravels the sweaters. (If it were me doing this, I'd totally do it while watching reruns of my favorite show...) SO, as I understand it, she is essentially getting entire skeins' worth of yarn for a buck or two per skein, which she uses to knit hats and mittens. (Compare this with buying yarn at the craft store, where even with a sale or coupon the yarn could cost around $4-5 per skein.)

I am pretty sure my jaw had hit the floor by the time my roommate had finished telling me about this practice of her mother-in-law's. Once I'd fully absorbed the story, I said, "With your permission, I'd like to blog this..." :)

If you were a person who was very crafty with knitting winter accessories, especially for rapidly-growing kids who were only going to use them for a few months, this could be an extremely frugal way to go about it!