So that’s what you do with yarn leftovers…

If you knit socks, or anything really, you probably have yarn leftovers. But socks in particular always seem to leave me with extra fingering weight yarn. With a shawl, I can often fudge the pattern a bit to use every last bit. But socks… well, making them longer just to use up the yarn doesn’t work out well. Or you are making socks for bigger feet, and making them shorter so as not to break into a second skein won’t work either (I know some do toe-up and shorten the leg but I think this only works when the wearer is happy with chilly ankles).

Anyway, I have a growing pile of extra bits of fingering, especially when I make socks for my not-particularly-big feet. The various sock-yarn blankets have never really interested me, but today I found a use for some of them.

As I mentioned in my last post, I’m working on a sock pattern. Since I’ve never done this before I don’t completely trust my math around the heel turn and gusset decreases, or for that matter, that I haven’t made mistakes in the charts for different sizes. So I came up with a plan!

I don’t want to make eight full pairs of socks in all the sizes. I mean, jeez… I’ll be sitting here same time next year not done yet if I want to knit anything else.  So instead I’m doing just a few rounds, then diving straight into the heel flap. I’ll finish though the gusset decreases and then cast off. That’s more like 1/3 of a sock x 7 sizes + the one pair I am finishing = 4 + 1/3^rd socks. Way more manageable.

And, I definitely have fingering sock yarn leftovers in 7 different colors, so I won’t get totally bored!

I did a little stash diving and pulled a bunch out. It’ll be kinda fun to see how the pattern looks across different colors and yarn designs. The first one I cast on is actually the leftover yarn from knee-high socks AwesomeE knit me. She gave me the extras to fix the hole I made in them (which I have done!) but since I spent like an hour untangling and reballing the yarn before mending, I figure she won’t mind me appropriating it too much for my project. Also, she can’t exactly come wrangle it back right now…

Bonus? You hopefully won’t get too bored to tears of pictures of partial socks either, because there are going to be a lot of them.

Anyway, I’m pretty happy with what I’ve done today on the pattern and my craft goals. I used yesterday for some chores (including grocery shopping) so that these wouldn’t make me feel guilty and/or distract me while I tried to do crafting the rest of this weekend. Then I mucked about on other non-craft stuff the rest of Friday – a true day off. So today I was nice and rested and actually spent more time working on my knitting, spinning, and writing up stuff than on procrastinating/internet surfing.