Getting creative with left over yarn

When I purchase yarn for a new design I’m working on, I always tend to buy a couple of balls more than what I need for the actual sample garment.

There are several reasons for this. Sometimes it’s because I require the additional yarn to swatch the stitch patterns I want to use in the design. Another reason is that I may decide midway through the design that I want to change it slightly, such as making the sleeves longer which will require more yarn.

Another reason is making sure I have enough yarn in the same dye lot in case I find I run out near the end of making the sample pattern, where I may not be able to obtain the same dye lot again and I therefore risk a variation of colour in the finished garment.

I was recently working on a sweater design and on completion of the sample garment, I had 2 x 50g balls left over in two colours (the sweater was a coloured striped pattern). Part of the garment being knitted, is featured in the cover photo of this blog post.

This yarn by CaMaRose is so soft and scrumptious that I didn’t want to see those left over balls of merino yarn go to waste.

I therefore got creative and worked out that there was enough in the meterage of these left over balls to knit a scarf.

I absolutely love wearing scarfs throughout the winter and sometimes I also make them for other people as gifts.

I decided to keep this scarf for myself as I really love the colours which will go with a lot of my clothes and it is so soft against my skin.

I decided to do a rib design and created wide coloured stripes instead of the thinner stripes that I had created in the original sweater this yarn had been used for.

Here is the finished scarf:

I made this scarf design into a free pattern which can be downloaded on the ‘Free Patterns’ section of my website so check it out.

Happy knitting everyone x