One Skein Wonders

Ten hanks of bare yarn and a bunch of dye led to ten mismatched balls of hand-painted yarn.  It was exciting to experiment with color and go wild.  But now it’s time to figure out what to do with it all.  None of the yarn matches the next.

Two balls of yarn did become seed-stitch cowls this week.  (And one became a cat-eared beanie last week.)  The first cowl was cast on for a 24 inch circumference and color-pooling just naturally happened to create swirling stripes.  Yay for that!

For the second cowl, I chose a more color-intense hand-painted yarn.  I thought wouldn’t it be awesome to line up the color repeats exactly and create vertical stripes?  So, I laid out my yarn in large loops to find the repeats in the color and then knit up a sample in seed stitch to find the exact number of stitches in a color repeat and then cast on the appropriate number of stitches to get them to line up perfectly.  Then knitting row after row in anticipation of the striping, I got just a random dispersion of color.  No stripes.  Oh well.  I still think it’s pretty.  I’d forgotten how much I love the beauty and simplicity of the seed stitch. I’m not sure what is going to become of the rest of the lone balls of hand-painted yarn.  Maybe some mittens and chunky socks will be on the horizon.  What else can you make out of 110 yards of worsted weight yarn?  Maybe stripe it with a solid into a scarf?

For those who would like to make a worsted-weight seed-stitch cowl, simply cast on 125 stitches (or appropriate odd number of stitches to get the circumference you want) and join in the round, being careful not to twist. K1,P1 around and around until you have just a few yards of yarn left.  Bind off and weave in ends.