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Bust Through Your Stash with a Garter Stitch Blanket

April 30, 2015 by Sarah White

garter stitch afghanConfession time: my stash is starting to make me a little nervous. I have book leftovers, yarns I bought, things people have sent me to review, little bits of balls from projects I’ve finished and big projects I stopped in the middle.

Something needs to be done.

I have plans for some of this stuff; some will get used, some given away, maybe even a little sold. If you’re looking for a way to use a bunch of yarn (somewhat) quickly, check out the Color Blocked Afghan from Smiling Colors. More of a method than a pattern, she used two strands of yarn held together and changed colors five times across the length of the blanket.

You could also hold two different colors together, or have one strand the same color throughout and change the other one as needed.

Holding two strands together like that both makes it go faster and makes it go through yarn faster, both of which are great when you’re trying to process some stash.

What are some of your favorite stash busting projects? I’d love to hear about them!

[Photo via Smiling Colors.]

Next Pattern:

  • Bust Your Stash and Keep Warm at the Same Time
  • Knit a Garter Stitch Blanket with a Twist
  • Stripe Your Stash to Make an Easy Blanket
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Comments

  1. Jenny Lloyd says

    May 27, 2021 at 1:26 pm

    The end result would be much appreciated by the homeless. Friend pays a huge amount of postage to ship hers from the UK to Africa. My knitting group prefers not to pay that, we’re retirees, some on small incomes. I intend no criticism of anyone,it’s a free country for anyone to do what they like with their charity makes. but by phoning around locally, we’ve found 2 homeless hostels who welcome our stash-busting blankets.

Have you read?

Knit a Hat with a Flock of Chickens

It’s well known (among knitters, anyway) that knitters seem to love chickens as a motif and a subject of our knitting projects. The Emotional Support Chicken and all the other chicken knitting patterns are just the beginning of our devotion to farmyard friends. 

For example, there’s Farmer Dennis’ Chicken Hat. This free pattern from Stacy Black is a simple worsted weight beanie sized for adults and decorate with a couple of little rounds of colorwork fences and a flock of chickens strutting around the body of the hat. 

You don’t need a lot of any of the colors for the chickens, their facial features or the fences, so this is a great project for using little leftover bits from other projects. The main color for the body of the hat is less than a skein using the yarn suggested, so you might just have everything you need in your house to start stitching up this hat right away. 

The colorwork is presented as a chart, with a 16 stitch section that repeats around the body of the hat. All the color changes are shown on the chart but I think it would be easier to knit the whole chicken in the chicken color and add the eye, beak and other features using duplicate stitch when the knitting is done. That way you don’t have to carry those yarns around the whole hat for just a few stitches. 

As the name suggests, the original hat was given to a farmer who shared their eggs, but anyone who raises chickens or just has a thing for the fowl is sure to love this cute hat. It wouldn’t be too difficult for someone new to stranded knitting or reading charts to make, either, so if that’s you, give it a try. 

The pattern is available for free on Ravelry. 

[Photo: Stacy Black]

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