Leftovers

What do you do with your leftover yarn?

Here are some ideas:

Sometimes I make flowers.

Other times I make scrap yarn afghans

This one is a sample of a scrap yarn afghan a la Charlotte.  I usually use two strands of rotating scrap yarn and one strand of constant yarn (in this case tan) throughout.  I've made probably five to seven of these, and I've found that they work GREAT for camping or picnic blankets.  Since they're just scrap yarn, I don't feel a need to keep them in pristine shape, so I don't get bent out of shape when they get dirty.

This smaller one is an afghan that my husband's grandmother started years ago.  After she passed on, it went to his mother, and a few months ago his mother passed it on to me.  I add a line here and there.

If I have leftover decorative or novelty yarn, I'll usually save it to use in packaging for my etsy sales.

My mom recently sent me a listing of some other ideas.  Here are some of my favorites.

A reader at favecrafts.com uses leftover snippets as pillow fill

A yarn ball wreath or yarn egg wreath is always fun.

Check these out here:

 And here:

 This apple is easy enough that a child can help, but still pretty darn cute. 

 

  Directions here.

This yarn art looks complicated, but once you look at the instructions, I think it might actually be do-able.

Any other ideas?

Brilliance, Sheer Brilliance

This is a great idea.

I don't knit, but as someone who knows only too well the agony of cold yoga feet, I'm tempted to work out some way to crochet something along these lines for my size 8 1/2 tootsies. 

(If you do knit, there's a free pattern here.)

scrub-a-dub-dub

Last month my husband and I took a little trip to San Francisco.  Knowing that there would be evenings (and mornings) spent on the bed, channel surfing and basking in the ease that being temporarily childless affords, I (naturally) wanted to bring something to crochet.  However, I did not want to have to bring several different colors of yarn, several different hooks, or anything too bulky.

And that friends, is how it came to be that I boarded the plane home with a purse full of 78 citrus grove scrubbies.

(Interestingly enough, in the catch-your-flight waiting area, the woman across me was crocheting, as was a woman catty corner from me.  Of course, our flight was a direct Oakland to Salt Lake flight, and Utahns tend to have a high percentage of crocheters per capita.  Still, kind of fun, in a nerdy kind of way.)