Spring Cleaning

I think I posted a little while ago about being frustrated with my uarn stash - the feeling that I had plenty of yarn but none of it was acutally useful or fitted to a project that I wanted to knit.  As buying a gazzilionty more skeins of beautiful new yarn is just a tad beyond the budget (although honesty compels me to tell you that there has been a pretty little squishy package arrived in the post recently and I very much hope there'll be another one as soon as it clears customs) it was time to pull out the stash and find out what I actually have.

The answer, as I expected, was a good amount of the little ends of balls of yarn from finished projects, a whole load of single skeins and a surprising amount of Baby Cashmerino in various colours - I forsee some sort of baby-sized colourwork in the near future.

 It's all rearranged now and mostly back in the cupboard; I gave myself permission to throw out lots of the little mini balls that are never going to be used for anything, and set aside some yarn that I'm never going to knit to be destashed as soon as I work out how Ebay works (discontinued Rowan Yorkshire Tweed 4ply and some Rowan Pure Wool if anyone's interested).

I also started to pull together some yarn and patterns and move them into project bags to sit by my chair in the lounge in the hope that I might get the occasional moment to knit while little Miss plays in her Jumperoo next to me.

In the stash I rediscovered a whole load of oddments of DK and worsted weight cotton, mostly leftovers from Kitty's bib collection.  We've been using knitted dishcloths for years now and the problem is that they look like they've been used for years so my first stashbusting project united all the oddments and my favourite 5.5mm needles with butterflies painted on the ends.



I didn't have a pattern for these, I just cast on and went for it.  Most of them are knitted on the diagonal from a cast on of three stitches, increasing with yarnovers until it looked about the right size and then decreasing on every row with yarnovers in every alternate row back down to three.

The log cabin ish ones I started by knitting a little square and then turning 90 degrees at the end of the cast off and picking up the next block along the side.


Some are just plain, using up varigated yarn, the blue one is stripes in a Fibbonacci series, and then there are just purely random ones, striped entirely at whim.


When so much knitting requires careful attention to a pattern, and with so much else going on at the moment  it's been really relaxing to just go with it.

I've still got a little bit of turquoise and orange left over but I seem to have quenched my dishcloth thirst, and I think the kitchen is clean enough for now.