The Ultimate Stash Burner
How to use (at least some of) your stash!
I love sharing interesting patterns and knitting ideas with you! Here is an idea for how to use up some of those little odds and ends and small leftover balls of yarn.
Sometimes I am caught between knits, and then I grab my Ultimate Stash Burner.
It is a simple garter stitch blanket, alternating rows of light and dark colour, and when a light or dark colour is used up I join it with another corresponding colour from a stash of little leftover balls of yarn that have accumulated over the years.
I keep this project in an old wine box, which makes it look rather pretty, even while it’s in the works. And when I have a little bit of yarn that I don’t know what to do with, I toss it into the wine box, to become part of my Ultimate Stash Burner.
This is a long-running project, who knows when ( or if ) it will ever be large enough to cast off and be used. But I enjoy having it and doing a little bit on it now and then. I love challenging knit projects, but it’s nice to have something easy to return to in between. This garter stitch blanket makes for a nice conversation friendly kind of knitting, no need to stop mid-sentence to count stitches or refer back to complicated instructions.
The pattern for my blanket is from a book by Arne & Carlos that I checked out from the library years ago, which included many lovely designs, among them this garter stitch blanket. If you can even call it a pattern, it’s so simple.
There is a YouTube Video where Arne & Carlos present this way of knitting a blanket, you can see it here.
And here is mine, in the works:
I thought this was the perfect Ultimate Stash Burner pattern.
But that was until I discovered Garter Ripple Squish in a post about repurposing yarn from ab old project, by
.It’s so lovely! I wish I knew about it when I started my “Ultimate Stash Burner”.
But if you haven’t already started one, here’s your chance!
I might actually purchase the pattern and use it for a baby blanket (or blanket for the cat!!!), because it is so darn cute.
Do you have an ongoing project to use leftover yarn?
This reminds me of a course I did years ago with Brandon Mably, where we began by sorting our stash into light and dark. Then we used a very simple fair isle type design, which I think was Kaffe Fassett’s Poppies, and just knit, using up short lengths of yarn and knotting new ones in as we ran out. I ended up with several swatches, and the point was to discover new colour combinations we wouldn’t otherwise have considered. Somewhere I still have those swatches!
I have a mitered squares blanket I'm making from leftover fingering weight yarn. It's lap sized now, and I still have enough leftovers to make another one, however I feel this one is close to finished. I need to level out the squares (one side has more than the other) then add the triangles around the sawtooth edge, and call it finally finished.
I've been tinkering with it for over a decade.