Scrap yarn challenge #6
It has been a little while since my last post about using up scrap yarn. I must admit that I have mostly been accumulating scraps lately without thinking too much about ways to use them up. However, I was recently given a huge pile of unfinished knitting and crochet projects to finish off (these had been donated to an Op shop - a charity store that sells second-hand goods to raise funds for charity - who were unable to sell them in their unfinished state) along with quite a bit of leftover yarn in various colours, weights and yarn types (ie wool, synthetic etc). There were over 100 granny squares - 112 were all one size, 34 were another size and then there were a few odd ones that were other sizes. It was interesting looking at the different squares and reminded me of one reason why people crochet granny squares in the first place - granny squares are a great way to use up small amounts of yarn. You can either do a whole square (as big or small as you like) with a single colour or you can have different colours for different rounds.
In the case of these squares, there were even some that had been made using different colours within a round (ie the person making them had run out of a colour part-way through a round and then just carried on with a new colour to finish the round).
You don't even necessarily need all your yarn to be the same weight. There were a few examples amongst the collection where they had taken two strands of thinner yarn in contrasting colours and crocheted them together to form some of the rounds of some squares.
You can also use small amounts of yarn to sew granny squares together (or other squares or amigurumi projects). You can also crochet together granny squares using a granny square join (which makes it look a little seamless) like I have done. I used the same principles for crocheting these together as the original maker had done with making the squares in that if I ran out of a colour during joining, I simply picked up the next colour in the bag of leftovers and continued to crochet them together. For some parts, I also used 2 thinner strands of yarn (most likely 4 ply yarn) together, like the original creator of the granny squares had done (as seen in the above photo) to get the yarn to approximately dk weight. More about the granny join I used in another post. Here's a photo of one of the donated granny square blankets I've been working on. This one has, from memory, about 112 granny squares in it. I'm hoping the finished size will be about single bed sized. I will probably use some yarn from my stash to make a border around it to tie it all together and I will probably donate it to charity so that hopefully it will keep someone warm this winter. As you might be able to see in the photo, the original maker of the squares did not weave in the ends at the end of each square and I still haven't woven in the ends from joining individual squares together so there will be lots of weaving in at the end and I'm sure I'll have to find something to do with all the tiny leftover ends once they are woven in and trimmed. Maybe that will be something to do for the next yarn scrap post (hopefully the blanket will be finished before then).
