
We’ve been talking all about spring cleaning this week, about caring for and storing your knits, and about spring cleaning your stash too!
One of the things I have learned, after a few stash purges, is that I love to buy single skeins, but there is a danger they’ll hang about not being used unless they find their way into multi-coloured projects. With that in mind, I’ve recently found it useful to collect single skeins in a couple of my most loved yarn types; these skeins are similar enough to be combined across yarn brands to make multi-coloured projects.

single-ply sock weight yarns
One of my stash boxes holds a pretty fabulous rainbow of sock weight single-ply yarns. I don’t hesitate to add to this collection because these types of yarns are so easy to use together. Most of the really popular hand-dyers and nearly all of the smaller companies dye on this type of base, so finding colours that work together on similar bases is very easy, and very useful for designs like the Burnished shawl, Slice shawl, or a cute I Heart Rainbows colourwork yoke.


plied sock weight yarns
If you’re partial to more hard-wearing plied sock yarns, they are another type to collect for mixing and matching. Some sweater designs, like raindrops, you can make a baby or toddler size out of a single skein, and for other designs, like Playdate or Flax Light, you can always stripe 2 skeins together, which would give you sufficient yardage to make up to a 6 year old size.



hand-dyed DK or sport weight yarns
The most extensive collection of mix-able yarns that I hoard is DK (and sport) weight hand-dyed yarn, like Madelinetosh Tosh DK, SweetGeorgia DK, Rainbow Heirloom Sweater, and other various lovelies. These rainbow brights are just crying out to be used together, and work well in multi-colour projects like Fly Away, Bumble beanie, Peanut vest, Clayoquot cardigan, Vivid blanket … the list goes on, and you can check out all our colourwork projects here.
This is probably the yarn type Alexa and I design in most often, especially for colourwork; so you’ll see a lot of projects that can be started (or completed) with a good dig through this category of your stash! Many of the accessories in Mad Colour are worked in this type of yarn, using scraps and odds and ends.

Do you have a strategy for collecting similar sorts of yarns? What does your stash look like? Share your stash… we like to hashtag ours #yarnporn!
Scraptastic projects from TCK:
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April 30, 2017 @ 7:19 am
Brilliant! Now I have stash envy!