Making the most of loose ends

May 16, 2016

Making the most of loose ends

At the start of the year I made a resolution to reduce the size of my stash. Nearly half way into the year I have been making some progress. Although as lovely people keep giving me lovely yarn, I'm not showing as much overall progress as I might.

One of the things I find very hard to do is throw out odd balls, or ends of balls, left over from bigger projects. As any knitter will know these can linger unloved in a stash, for a long time. To avoid this happening I've been trying to use up the left over yarn from larger projects straight away.

After finishing my Rialto quince cardigan in March, I whipped through a series of baby knits. Always useful to have some of these in stock as my friends all seem to be breeding like the proverbial rabbits ;-)

When I finished my Ravello jumper last month I was left with 2 full skeins of emerald alpaca silk, much too much, and too nice, to go for baby clothes. A quick search of my pattern books turned up Deco City a beautiful shawl pattern, needed exactly the amount of yarn I had, perfect.

The pattern of the shawl looks deceptively difficult, its really fairly simple, and knitted up in no time. Even better, when I'd finished, I had such a small amount of yarn left I didn't feel bad about throwing it out :)

I decided to gift the shawl to my mum for her birthday (which was yesterday). Mum taught me to knit, and our interest in knitting, sewing and other crafts is something I love being able to share with her. Although I regularly knit gifts for my dad and brother, I don't very often knit for my mum. I tend to give her yarn, so she can have the enjoyment of knitting it up herself. It was a real pleasure to knit this for her, Happy Birthday Mum!