You probably have been wondering where I vanished to, I haven’t been hiding under a rock, but rather been bogged down by work and also needed a break from online life.

Travel Turtle an I have made an escape to beautiful Portugal to recharge our batteries after this endless winter and have come back fresh and full of new ideas and resolves, also due to the fact that every paradise also has a snake.

In this case the snake came in the form of plastic waste that was littering every beautiful spot we went to. It is so saddening and also scary to see that people leave their mark in form of waste wherever they go (or even wherever the wind blows it!)and don’t even care enough about it to pick it up when it’s right in front of their feet in the golden sand.

So here is my resolve: I have been avoiding plastic packaging already but now I’ll also skip bottled shampoo, soap and shower gel and replaced them with bars. If I use one bottle of shampoo and one bottle of shower gel a month or so that adds up to 48 bottles a year, which is completely and utterly unneccessary! Just multiply this for a family of four and you’ll have an insane amount of waste just in your bathroom. Think about it.

So my bathroom will be free of plastic from now on.

I pledge never to use plastic bottles ever again. (Thank you @Sealegacy for the inspiration). This bar-stuff is magical, who needs bottles anyway?

Sorry, I just needed to get this off my chest and mayyyybe even inspire a few of you to also skip plastic bottled stuff. Sorry for going all eco on you, but I feel that handicrafts and environmental sensitivity go hand in hand, please enlighten me if you don’t.

If you are following @mrsmumpitz_travelturtle on Instagram you’ll have seen some impressions from the European paradise full of incredible cities, dreamy beaches and historical places.

Needless to say that knitting wasn’t our priority, but still I managed to finish one pair of fingerless scrappy mittens. Hooray!

I used my Coffee Time Mittens pattern and inserted one purl round before each colour change, just before one leftover arn out. I really love this look and will definitely make more!

Inspired by the scrap swap I am now in full-on scrap-mode, my scrappy bowls are overflowing and it’s hard to choose where to start. This is the last package that arrived in return for the scraps I sent out, so I after winding these I am good to go!

And behold: the Candy-bowls :))) Filles to the brim with yarny goodness!

This is the first pair of socks I made from some scraps in the first of three packages, and I’m really happy with the result! Don’t you just love them???

I’ve already cast on my next project which I introduced you to in my last post. I’ll grab colours randomly and combine them without any special preparation, just take them as they come. I’m already deeply in love! The pattern is very inspiring and gived lots of ideas for pimping the colour changes 🙂 It’s called Lovely Loona by Astrid Schramm.

I leave you here with these ideas to chew on and hope you’ll find some inspiration. What are you working on? What inspires you??

Do you have any more cool ideas? I’d love to hear them in the comments!

Scrap yarn blending techniques

Patterns that use scrappy amounts of yarn

20 free leftover project patterns

Happy knitting!