Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Leftover satisfaction

   There is something particularly satisfying about using up yarn left over from a previous project. I've had a couple of projects lately to use up some Kauni yarn. I love its long color changes but I sometimes need to edit out particular colors.
I took the large amount left from my Maya Dreams sweater and knit a big garter stitch shawl. It's so big that I photographed it folded up.
This was perfect to knit while watching TV. (For one thing, watching TV kept my mind off how long it took to do a single row as I approached the end. An outside row was 94 inches/240 cm long as it went along two sides of the triangle. That's almost 8 feet! I have no idea how many stitches.) I didn't time it, but I'm sure it took me over two hours to cast off the edge. I cast on a few stitches and increased one stitch on each edge and two stitches at the center on every other row. It was knit garter stitch alternating two balls of yarn.
   Usually one ball was grey and the other ball was something else like green or blue or purple. I'm very happy with the way it turned out. I suppose it I get very cold I can wear both my sweater and shawl since they were knit from the same colorway and therefore match very well.
  The other Kauni I had left over was a small amount of the rainbow colorway from my Obsession Sweater.

I knit a tam because I wanted to know my gauge when combining Kauni and 2 ply jumper yarn from the Shetlands. I'm planning to use that combination on an upcoming sweater: using grey as the background for Kauni colorway EL that shades from blue to purple. So here is my Rainbow Leftovers tam. The crown is all Shetland as I was out of green in Kauni. I got the crown pattern from Knitted Tams by Mary Rowe.

4 comments:

Lynn said...

Your shawl and tam are both just beautiful. I'm just getting ready to start a sweater with the rainbow Kauni. It's the first time I've worked with it and I can't wait to get started.

Carolina said...

Rainbow Kauni is one of the most beautiful yarns in the world.

Laura said...

The tam is simply gorgeous and the shawl beautifully simple. I'd love to see a photo of the full shawl (maybe on Ravelry?) Leftover projects sometimes end up being favorite of mine. They free me to design on the needle which is so gratifying.

Queen of the Tea Cosies said...

love love love