A scrappy week of knitting

A jumble of yarns of various colours, some in balls (sock yarn, worsted weight in a purple variegated yarn) and skeins (Bamboo bloom and natural chunky in natural white and brown.

A scrappy week of knitting

One of my favourite things to play with is yarn scraps. When Carla issued a scrap yarn challenge to use up leftover yarns from last year’s KNITmuch posts, I jumped at it!

The photo above is the “scrap heap” that arrived in the mail (I added two leftover balls of Rozetti Cotton Gold in blue and silver that I had reviewed in November):

A pink and white cowl on a dress form.

A pair of dice, a circular needle and some time are all that are needed to make this cowl!

From this lovely mess I pulled the Bamboo Bloom, Classic Shades Metallic, the dark taupe tweed, and the Cotton Gold.

The first day’s post talked in detail about each of the yarns in the package.

On day two, we took the two skeins of Bamboo Bloom, a pair of dice, and a circular needle and created the Cowl by Chance. This fun knitting method can be applied to any yarn where random knit and purl stitches will work to the yarn’s advantage.

On Wednesday, we took the Classic Shades Metallic and a free pattern from the Universal Yarn website and created the Get to the Point cowl. I squeaked this one out of a single ball of yarn with about two yards to spare! I totally loved the way this long-span variegated yarn forms soft rings of colour around the wearer’s neck! The challenge in this post was to adjust a pattern to yarn of a different weight. Yarn substitution is something a lot of knitters want to do, but many are too shy to try. I showed how to do it, and I mocked up my pattern with my adjustments. I also did a loose cast on that beginning knitters might want to check out.

A snug cowl that fans out over the shoulder, coming to six points at the lower edge. The yarn naturally forms rings of gold, purple, lavender and olive green.

The Get to the Point cowl, a free pattern from Universal Yarn.

The lower end of a dark taupe, tweed scarf with cables and openwork, draped over the shoulder of a dress form

The first foot or so of the Flint Ridge Scarf

Our third project of the week was another free pattern from the Universal yarn site, the Flint Ridge Scarf.  This time, I followed the pattern as written, but I only had half of the yarn the pattern required. In this post, I gave two tips to improve the look of a project – one about choosing the right cast on to fine-tune your edge, and another about using short rows to prevent garter stitch edgings from curling.

The last post of the week surprised me. When I had reviewed Rozetti Cotton Gold in November, I took a pattern called Pheilraupe and made this rather stunning shawl.

 

A silver shawl with a thin blue stripe across the bottom draped over a plain white dress form

Pheilraupe, made from Rozetti Cotton Gold yarn

I had about 20 grams left of the blue and a whopping 15 grams (1/2 oz) of the silver left from the shawl. I took another ball of scrap yarn, about 95 grams of black acrylic yarn I had leftover from an afghan project, grabbed my needles, and created these:

Three evening bags. In the foreground is a black one that inspired the two knitted ones, both black with sequinned trim, one with a narrow band of silver and the other a wide band of blue.

These evening bags (top two) do NOT look as though they were made from scrap yarn!

The educational component of this post was the finishing — each bag was lined, outfitted with a shoulder cord, and anchored with a magnetic clasp.

This week of blogging was both challenging and FUN! I hope you take a cruise through the KNITmuch site and see the details of these projects!

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