Baby Blankets with Coordinating Hats

     The Crochet Guild of Southern New Jersey got a request from another local organization for baby blankets with matching hats.  Since we rely on yarn donations, often there is not enough yarn to complete a project.  Sometimes we receive weirdly colored yarn or yarn composed of unusual fibers.  Here are my contributions so far to this project:

This yarn is very soft, good for babies, but the colors are not traditional.  The fiber content is 50% rayon from bamboo and 50% rayon from another source.  Rayon is also known as viscose.  Ordinary rayon is made from regenerated wood cellulose, and bamboo rayon is made from the regenerated cellulose of the bamboo plant.  Bamboo rayon is pretty much the same as regular rayon.  Regeneration refers to the chemical change that happens to the cellulose when it is processed.  Processing bamboo cellulose involves steaming and crushing the plant then treating the cellulose with lye and carbon disulfide.  Emissions from this process cause air pollution and damage the heath of textile workers.  If you think that fabric made from bamboo is natural, made in the same way as cotton, linen, or wool, think again.  Bamboo rayon is neither natural nor artificial.  To see that something is made from bamboo sounds "green," but the processing is far from a "green" operation. In China, bamboo replaced wood cellulose for rayon production because bamboo grows quicker.  The bamboo forest renews itself faster and can grow in poorer soil than a normal forest.  While the antimicrobial properties of bamboo are questionable, the fabric is biodegradable and can be composted when it reaches the end of its serviceable life.   

There wasn't enough of this multi-colored acrylic yarn to make the blanket, so the edges are multi-colored and the center is done with white yarn.  The yellow edge brings the yellow hat into the mix.  I could go on about acrylic fiber because it is made from petroleum, but I have always known that.  The bamboo yarn story was eye opening to me, and I thought it might also be for H in H readers.  

   
   
     Note: I always wash the finished projects since the source of the yarn is almost always unknown.