I like knitting socks, which works well for me because I seem to have a rather strong affinity for buying individual skeins of sock yarn - I pick them up in mystery grab bags, I snag them when visiting yarn shops when travelling, I indulge in them when I find sales, and I'll just snap them up from indie dyers whenever they're available. Sock yarn, I haz it.
All these individual skeins of sock yarn don't help me much when I want to knit sweaters, though, and that happens with a pretty high degree of frequency too. So I've been collecting sweater-sized batches of yarn in various sales over the years too. But I don't stash sweater yarn as much as sock yarn, mostly because doing so is cost prohibitive, but also this makes life easier in terms of managing my storage space and dodging being teased about turning our house into a yarn shop. (He insists I have more yarn than yarn shops. I counter by pointing out that he hasn't really ever been in a yarn shop, so how would he even know.) Each time I knit a sweater though, I get a little flourish of anxiety - one less batch in the stash. Every so often, I do a count - how many sweaters do I have left before I run out?
All my sock knitting also has a way of generating little partial skeins - the remnants that I don't need to use to turn out a pair of socks. A few years ago I discovered the joy of cobbling these together into scrappy socks, but the thing about scrappy socks is they keep me from getting to other sock yarns. Some of my sock yarns have been hanging about for a good long while now, seems a shame to continue keeping them from their destiny. But, I find real satisfaction in using up these scraps.
And then Tanis posted this, and my head just about exploded. No, really, if you haven't already seen it, click that link and go look. In making the sample for her Gartrell Pullover (Ravelry link), she used many different colours in stripes, and she used different coloured stripes on the sleeves compared to on the body. (But the sleeves do match each other.) Seeing that suddenly made my path perfectly clear: I can use my sock remnants to make sweaters!
Honestly, I never considered this option before because I assumed the result would make me look crazy - like some sort of desperate yarn hoarder cobbling together whatever she could get her hands on. But the multitude of colours on Tanis' sweater absolutely doesn't look crazy - it works out amazingly well. To be perfectly fair, this is likely due to her considerable colour savvy - the woman knows how to use colour! Me? I'm less confident in my own colour savvy, but what's the worst that could happen?
Scuttling through my remnant collection - though not all of it, I still haven't found those missing bits - has generated this collection of reds and purples, with some others tossed in for good measure. If I have at least 30 g leftover from each skein - one I'm quite sure is less, but a couple of others I'm quite sure are more - then I've got at least 360 g, which should be equivalent to three skeins, which should be sufficient for a sweater.
I've got a pattern to use as a template. Let's do this!
Well. After I finish up a different sweater real quick. Apparently having four different sweaters for me on the needles all at once crosses some sort of mental threshold. I'm almost done the body, and then I just need to knock out the sleeves. It's worsted weight, it'll go fast.
Right?
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