Day 295 and Color Correction

I love to find yarn in thrift shops. Sometimes I get lucky and find balls of yarn with the bands still on, but sometimes I buy a sweater with the intention of ripping it up and harvesting the yarn. Other times and this is much more rare, I find half finished projects. Many thrift shops that I frequent don't even put these out on the floor and the donated half thing is just sent to the bin. If I can find them, I usually snag them up and they are often much easier to take apart than a finish sweater. This one was definitely an exception.

Here's what the fabric looked like before I started messing with it.
You can't tell very well from this photo, but the yellow is ruining the whole piece. It's a bizarre neon shade that completely detracts from the three otherwise nice neutral colors. Another couple of cons for this monster: It's acrylic and it's made with many strands held together. Now, there's nothing wrong with modern acrylic. It's much softer than counterparts made decades ago and it's very machine friendly, but this one was a little older than I usually accept. As for holding many strands together, again there's nothing wrong with it, but pulling it apart is where the problem lies.

Frogging a single strand of something is no problem at all. YOu wind it into a ball or a skein as you go and you're ready to recondition and use it. If there's more than one strand though, you pretty much need as many other people helping you as there are strands in the fabric. This one had 4. I have some very generous helpful friends, but I suspect they no longer would remain so if I asked them to help me undo this ordeal. All those strands tend to braid around each other as you knit so pulling them into separate balls was darn near impossible.

Instead I figured I try to correct the color somehow. Since I can't remove strands from the beast, I'd add strands until it no longer offended my delicate constitution. One more brown and two greens later and I wasn't puking. Granted, I built some muscles handling fabric made from seven strands of yarn at the same time, but it sure is thick and warm!

Chalk this one up to my extreme pig-headedness.