Using up old yarn - can anyone beat this?

The naked Sindies go driving around in their car Bathsheba
Or just wearing a mac

I have fabric which I bought to make the DD dresses (over 30 years ago) so perhaps making little dresses for Syrian refugees could be an idea, as long as they're fairly simple. I am not into sewing much these days.

Not wool but left over fabric from when I made dresses for the children who are now in their 30's. I used it up making sundresses for ' Little dresses for Africa' charity appeal. Very simple and very satisfying.

Jalima my nearly 3 yr old DGD does the same, always strips their clothes off. She says it's because her babies are going to have a bath or they're having a poo. And yes, these are the dolls that belonged to her mum, dressed in clothes that I made nearly 40 years ago!
There used to be a big bag full of dolls clothes I'd made, but Heaven only knows what happened to them

DGD always strips the dolls (why?) and I always dress them again - in clothes that my mother knitted for DD's dollies over 40 years ago.
Actually, they are the same dolls!

Oh it's so lovely, going back to making these small things with love. My youngest GS was given a pram and I found twin 'babies' to fill it. Then had the pleasure of making blankets etc. Now my beautiful GGD visits and she also loves the 'babies' and their pram. Happy days.

I found a half-knitted jumper I was making for DD when she was about 7 (she's 36 now) and finished it to send off for a refugee child. However, before I posted it off DGD arrived with a flimsy summer dress on the other day and was cold playing outside. I found the jumper and she wore it for the afternoon .

Tanith, I was thinking just the other day of when it was cheaper to knit a school jumper than buy one. Ditto when it was cheaper for my mother to make our school summer dresses - from a prescribed Butterick pattern! - than to buy them. Who on earth would ever make a school summer dress now?
The long-gone days when most clothes were made in the UK rather than with much cheaper labour in China, Vietnam, etc. Anyone else remember the signs in M&S saying that over 99% of their goods were British made?

Back to using up yarn - I have lots of different coloured leftovers from a blanket I made when Gdd was on the way. I think I'll have to contrive another doll's blanket - when Gdd visits I have to find small hand towels for her to use as blankets for her babies!

Another reminder here, my Mum would unwind older handknitted articles then I would sit with her in the kitchen and we’d wind the wool round the back of the kitchen chair to form skeins which we wet and then dunked into warm soapy water and drip dried and rewound into balls to be reused. The stretching and dunking would take a lot of the kinking out of the wool. I’ve worn many 2nd and 3rd hand knitted school cardis ?

I can't claim that I have used up old wool but this thread has reminded me that my mum use to buy skeins of wool and, as a child,I used to help her wind it into balls by stretching the skeins between my two hands. She was an amazing knitter and I still have the beautiful shawl that she knitted for my first born. My two daughters and son all wore it to their Christenings. I can knit but nothing like she used to do.

When mil moved from a large house into a little flat when she was older and frailer we cleared out the house and came across a huge bag full of balls of wool she had left over from knitting baby clothes for our boys who are nearing 40 and also cones of single ply wool from when she used to wind her own wool in colour mixes to crochet blankets for everyone in the family . I told my husband that I would not throw it away and I'm now two thirds the way down it and have crocheted many many blankets for our caravan and camping family members.