A new year, a new challenge!

This year (like so many other years) I promised myself not to buy any new yarn but knit everything from stash or dye it myself. I know. Everyone tries, everyone fails. But one can always dream, right? So far I knit 15 projects from stash yarns and now I’m dead set on reducing my leftovers. Care to join in? I opened a left-over thread in my group on Ravelry, come and share your latest left-over reducers! We’d LOVE to see them!

So. I rounded up those little bits and pieces of yarn that NEVER fit anywhere but which I was too stubborn to throw away. All those cotton, acrylic, wool, merino or alpaca fingering/sport weight yarns that either had less than 10 meters of a life span left or were of such an ugly colour that they simply wouldn’t fit into any decent project. And I mixed them all together. I started off roughly sorting them by colour in the mad hope that I hadn’t overlooked that odd bit deeply buried in my stash somewhere. (So far I haven’t come across any that I might have forgotten. Fingers crossed!) And then I just needed to grab the ball on top of the pile when the last one ran out.

I needed a project that didn’t require much (or any) brain activity, so that I could knit and keep two eyes on my boy at the same time (he figured out how to climb shelves now, so much fun…). So it turned out to be a simple garter stitch scarf. In the beginning I wasn’t so sure whether I really wanted to knit a scarf at all, but then my brain just kept tuning out and the hands took over.

While knitting with two strands at the same time and adding a new one as soon as one of them ran out the colours blended together really nicely. And very soon the greens and blues ran out. Oh, this lovely feeling of using up a ball of yarn is so satisfying that it turned into quite and addiction and the whole scarf using up 376 grams of odds and ends knit up in four evenings. I actually really like it!

So I couldn’t simply stop there. It’s annoying, really, that my brain keeps thinking about the next project, as soon as I started something new. But for some reason this keeps happening and I had the plan for these two kids hats laid out before the scarf was even halfway done. Grabbing and organizing the yarn was done quickly and the hats knit up in a day’s time. The pattern for the pointy pompom hat is available here.

The hats are both up for grabs on Etsy.

Now I’ll dive into my stash again and see which yarns scream my name loudest. Why don’t you go and grab your leftovers and show me your projects made from them?