A fun pattern to use mini skeins of yarn.
Every September we have a Charlotte Area Yarn Crawl organized by several local yarn stores. It is a great event to support the stores, discover new stores (from time to time some stores are closing, others are opening), see some demos, or attend classes and win some prizes.
A couple of years ago I yarn crawled and get yarn from different stores. Here’s a picture of some of the yarns from this haul.
I didn’t have any project in mind at this point and chose the yarn to try a new texture or just by the color of the yarn. That is how I got in my possession a beautiful skein of Studio Sox yarn by The Fibre Studio at yarns to dye for in colorway Boho Chic (upper left in the picture).
The colors are gorgeous! But if you worked already with variegated yarn, you may know how sometimes it’s difficult to find the right pattern for the multicolored yarn. At some point, I winded the yarn and tried several stitches but no exact idea came to my mind, so I put the yarn back in my stash.
For the next year, I went on the yarn crawl again, and at The Fibre Studio, I found a super cute set of 13 tiny skeins.
Each skein represents a yarn type that the shop offers. Great way to explore different fibers, weights, and twists of the yarn. And right away an idea popped into my head, that I need to combine the Studio Sox skein and this set of tiny skeins into one project.
The idea of the scarf started to form. Each of the tiny skeins has only 10 yards. And I wanted to make some kind of stripes with them. But if we go with a normal type of stripes, it will be a gap between the main color and you need to carry yarn somehow or you need to break the yarn. To avoid this, I decided to go with the short row sections for the tiny skeins part. And on the side where you’ll be switching between yarns, you’ll have only 2 rows jump, which makes changing the yarn almost invisible.
For the main color part (made with 1 skein of fingering yarn) I chose the stitch pattern that is reversible and has a little texture. And to make knitting of straight sections less boring, I made them different lengths.
Because this is the project that uses 1 skein of the main color, I wanted to use the yarn up to the max, without any leftovers. The pattern gives you directions on how and where to pay attention to the yarn usage and how to correct your knitting to stay in 1 skein yardage.
And one more thing, before I start to describe all the technical details of the pattern.
I’m totally aware, that not everyone will have access to the set of the tiny skeins and many would be substituting them with the yarn they have. And I gave in the pattern an option on how you can use only 4 different contrast colors instead of a total of 13 like with the set. The sample was made with 4 contrast colors (different types of yarns and colors) + 1 main color (MadelineTosh Twist Light).
