Another GW Find!

I went to Goodwill on Thursday with my mom and I made a really good haul. Most of it was clothing to wear as is, but I found a lovely J Crew wool sweater to take apart.

100% wool, two ply, let's call it a DK weight.

I spent the next afternoon taking out seams and ravelling it and then winding it on my niddy noddy. It yielded these lovely skeins totally about 450 g (over 1000 meters).
Then the next question: what to do with it? Having cleared the docket for my Whistler sweater, I now find myself with two weeks to the Olympics and a severe lack of projects on the go. This led to no delay in preparing for something to do "in the mean time."

I've been seeing these Bella's Mittens by Marielle Henault a lot lately, and the thick cable look is very tempting. I guessed that I would have to double the yarn to make it the right weight. And figured that the sleeves should have enough yardage. So all that was left to do was to wind it up.

First step wind up one sleeve from the hank into a yarn cake.

Then set that one on the floor, put the hank from the other sleeve onto the swift, and wind them together into a new double weight ball:

For those of you who have a tinkertoy swift yourself, I have a little tip for you. The end of the yarn that you're not working with tends to unwind as it's spinning around and get tangled around the swift. But the tinkertoy parts have a slit in the end that you can put to work for you:
Holds the end in place and out of the way: simple solution, but worked like a charm!

I wound the two sleeves up into one yarn cake. It was huge--6 inches across.
Red (the rabbit) was still not impressed. She would have preferred a carrot.