Stashing Similar Yarns

Some of my special stash of single ply sock weight yarns, from a range of hand-dyers including Madelinetosh, Hedgehog Fibres, Rainbow Heirloom, and La Bien Aimee

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.

Burnished Shawl — Burnished looks great in 2 or 3 colours; go crazy and mix & match your odd balls!

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.

Mini-skein gradients are often dyed on this type of base; these are two lovely speckle sets by EasyKnits and they’ll find yarn friends in my stash of single-ply semi-solids

Slice Shawl — Slice uses bold blocks of colour and simple geometric lace

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.

Striped Swatch — I’m currently obsessed with this colour combo I swatched a couple weeks ago, neon yellow and teal! I think it needs to become a tiny Flax Light for Neve… but when will I find the time?!

Last year I made this little striped Playdate for Max out of 2 single skeins that were crying out to be combined!

Nina made Neve a tiny Flax Light (without the garter on the sleeves) in Rainbow Heirloom Merino Light in ‘killer flamingo’ and ‘kermit smiled’. Such a fantastic combo!

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.