There’s stash, and then there’s “it’s in my way” stash. For the first pandemic Yule season, I made the nieces and nephews some fun hats and sweaters. I also managed to finish one earflap hat (the first one shown in that earlier post).
That still left rather a lot of stash yarn. Too much for me to put away in my yarn storage, because… it’s already full of stash yarn.
Meanwhile, the ever-generous J-A gave me some assorted odd balls of yarn from a box she’d won.
All of which means that right now, I’m having some fun just making whatever the yarn moves me to, with the caveat that it has to be useful to someone, somewhere.
In the top left of the photo is a geodesic dome hat (aka a Buckminster Fuller dome). Something about my gauge compared to the pattern gauge was off, hard to say what because the pattern was on the vague side, so I added another row of triangles and made the earflaps small single triangles instead of the larger four-triangle shapes from the pattern. The colours were fun to work out for this one. I made a rule that two triangles of the same colour could share points but not an entire side.
In the top right is a beige knit-and-purl textured hat made from one of J-A’s prize skeins. Yes, I have made this pattern about seven times now. It’s quick and interesting to knit, and all recipients report the hat fits them well. The ribbed band goes from the forehead to the back of the head, and stretches width-wise to accommodate the wearer’s head.
The blue watch cap in the bottom left is also very stretchy, and has a neat diagonal panel wandering through the main fabric to keep the knitting from getting monotonous. I suspect it will fare better against the wind than a standard watch cap, because it’s in worsted-weight yarn , but only 3.5mm needles instead of the usual 5mm-ish.
The peppermint stripe had (seen here folded into quarters) will also be great against the wind, because the floats on the inside block the stitch holes on the outer layer. It’s a simple pattern that gets very mesmerizing and soothing to knit.
And then… There was a ball of cotton-based yarn from J-A’s stash that just didn’t want to be a hat. It’s the type of yarn where a biggish strand of unspun cotton is wound with a thin thread, creating a slubbed yarn with a light thick-and-thin texture. It’s not particularly stretchy, and the large amount of off-white doesn’t lend itself to items which might get dirty easily. Instead, I found a free crochet pattern and made a set of coasters out of it. Four coasters came within a couple of metres of using up the entire ball of yarn. I like the results — to me, the colours make for a 1950s-1970s look, almost like a raffia effect. I can imagine someone setting down some fruity cocktails on top of them.
It would be nice to say this made a substantial dent in the stash and that my living room is a bit less cluttered now, but I’ve still got about… two kilos of yarn, say? left. Two items are already on the needles and will contribute to the next blog post.