constant struggle with leftovers

We all have them.

The extra skein you bought just in case the sweater ate yarn. The 40 grams left from the socks you just finished because you have tiny feet and never use the whole ball. The piles and piles of little bits you save just in case you decide to go all Alice Starmore and make an epic fair isle sweater using 50 different colors in perfect harmony. Your favorite yarn comes in 200 yard balls but that hat only took 120, even with cables.

Leftovers. Rarely appealing in any sense of the word. Except Chinese takeout, but whatever.

I'm primarily a sock knitter so the bulk of my oddballs are fingering weight. I've always enjoyed using them in stripy socks as I saw fit and when the Beekeeper's Quilt came out I squeed a little bit.

I started making hexipuffs for that quilt in 2011. I finally stitched some together for this chair cushiony thing in 2014. I am still making hexipuffs. I have huge apothecary jars full of them. I just made another 20 this week. I'm just about hexipuffed out. Plus, each hexipuff only uses about 3 grams, takes 45 minutes a piece and oh my god just thinking that is enough to make me stabby after awhile. And then you have to sew them together. No small feat.

"Make minis and do swaps!" they say. Um. Have you ever priced that shit? No thanks. Totally not practical or logical for me to do. If that is your cup o'tea then drink on, sista! And then I just get MORE leftovers calling themselves minis.

I make a lot of stripy socks still. They are not always the prettiest, but I feel this innate frugal bliss when I finish a pair. Here are some recent projects:


This pair used up some self striping and a weird variegated. I still didn't use up all the yarn!












This is what the yarn looked like before:

And here is another pair I finished the other day. I actually really really love them more than I should. These would be the equivalent of Chinese food- as mentioned above. But we must stop mentioning it because now I need an eggroll. I also need an eggroll after our friend drives by in his biofuel van. True story.

I would share the before photos but I was really lazy and didn't take a pic of the variegated before I used it and just swiped the dyer's photo for my Ravelry project page.

Dreams of using fresh, whole unmolested skeins for completely pure monoyarn socks are dancing in my head. But the guilt of those leftovers is gnawing on my brain.

To ease the burden, I busted these out and those other hexipuffs (always with the hexipuffs) and the basket is significantly lighter but OMG. I need a fresh start.

What do you guys do with your leftovers? Is it morally corrupt to throw them away? Ha- I need to wear the scarlet A for that a million times over. Should I suck it up as a side effect of my chronic knitting?

Eggrolls.