I hate having leftover yarn.

Waste Not Want Not

In general, most of the yarn in my stash is pretty good quality yarn.  So when I finish a sock or a blanket or a sweater and I have left over yarn, I always think I’ll end up doing something with the extra yarn, so I stash it away in my wall of yarn…usually in a place where I won’t look often, so I can avoid the guilt of having stored something I will most likely never use.

If it’s a full ball/hank/skein or more of a yarn, it’s even more difficult to decide what to do.  I bring a box-load of single balls/hanks/skeins each year to the Men’s Knitting Retreat so newbies can practice with it, but not even a tenth of that yarn is even used.

I know there are tons of projects out there using scraps…I have even started a couple of those projects with lots of good intention, like the hexapuff blanket.

But when I tire of projects like this one…the bag of scrap sock yarn just grows and grows and so does the guilt.

And there are those that say I should donate the yarn…but I just can’t justify unloading my albatross of unused yarn on someone else.

My solution, is every once in a while, I go through all my leftovers and throw out what I know I’ll never use, and re-stash the items I think may some day be useful and try not to look at that drawer, to avoid the inevitable guilt.

Anyone have any workable solutions?

Current Knitting

To avoid leftovers on my current London Beanie project, I decided to ball up the remainders of every ball of Noro Hanabatake and make as many hats as I can of the leftovers.

The leftovers created a pretty large ball…probably enough to make 4 or 5 hats…and I’ll have no issue with throwing away whatever remains.