Yarn wrappings

Somehow, the more I hang around other knitters, the more I end up with bags of random skeins from yarn swaps (very casual affairs: bring yarn you don’t want any more, take yarn you like, anything left goes to the reuse shop that sells lots of craft supplies). I’ve also had two people randomly thrust bags of yarn stash at me and ask me to find a home for it. Well, all right, I suppose. Until I run out of room and start to feel mentally blocked because of too much yarn.

Lately, I’ve been in stash buster mode. I just finished knitting one shawl design from discontinued yarn and am considering (though I had other plans) working on another with this yarn:

P1012561

It’s mystery yarn. Fingering weight, tweedy. I need to do a burn test on it. I like it all, but I’d like to use it up. I seem to currently be obsessed with garter shawls in interesting shapes. Can I use this all up in another one of these?

In large blobs like this, it doesn’t look like a promising combination. Particularly not the lilac. So, not a colorblock shawl. But what about narrow stripes? This can sometimes work wonders, I think. So I decided to do what’s called a yarn winding.

The principle is straightforward: take a piece of cardboard and wind yarn around it in the proportions you’d like to have in the finished item.

I decided to try the narrowest possible stripes. For one thing, it let me wind two yarns at once (I rotated the card so the yarns wouldn’t twist together).  For another, narrow stripes can help colors blend together.

Yarn wrapping

And so it was here. I didn’t make all the possible combinations, but I did enough to give me a sense that it could well work.