How to use your stash inventory – The Sampler Afghan is a great answer to the question of how to use up your leftover bits and pieces of yarn and odd and end Granny squares and swatches.
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Why create the swatches you crochet to try out new stitches? The Sampler Afghan also answers this question.
Why save all those little odds and ends of skeins if you aren’t going to use them? The answers to these questions are ahead of us for the next several weeks.
Why waste all that work to crochet gauge squares if you aren’t going to do anything with them? What are you going to do with all those practice granny squares?
How to use your Stash inventory -The Sampler Afghan
How to use your stash yarn inventory can be confusing. What to do with all those bits and pieces of yarn and odds and ends of granny squares and sample bits that you have crocheted. There are several different ways to solve this problem.
Today we’re discussing two of my favorite methods of using up both stash yarn and leftover samples and bits and pieces; Sampler Afghans. There are two ways to make a sampler afghan.
- Create one Afghan using all the bits and pieces of leftover yarn you have.
- Create one Afghan with all the gauge swatches you have leftover from crochet things.
This is the second of these granny sampler afghans that I have made. They are my favorites. The colors interplay with each other and make wonderful sampler afghans.
Here is my current stash of odds and ends of yarn skeins that I keep in a rolling cart (link to one like mine), add in some other storage in another room and everything is full to overflowing. I take left over skeins and roll them into yarn cakes using my yarn winder. The yarn cakes then go in this little color coded drawer unit (link) according to color. It makes storage a breeze as the little yarn cakes don’t roll around and get all tangled up into a mess. As you can tell the color coding has gotten out of hand. The colors are all mixed up, simply because there isn’t room in some of the drawers. (Don’t get the idea that everything else is this organized, it’s really not. Crocheting is more fun than untangling a mess of yarn)
These are usually the beginnings of a big granny square afghan or an afghan like the sampler above or little projects that don’t take much yarn.
Another Sampler Afghan
Here is the second idea for creating a sampler afghan. It started with a simple idea. Create some washcloth patterns for free from Chocolate Dog Studio for you. It quickly evolved into this afghan. If you are going to create all these patterns for washcloths, then they need to be crocheted at least twice. Once out of cotton dishcloth yarn and once out of any yarn you choose. The sampler afghan started a year ago. You can find almost all of the patterns here on the blog and they will work for the afghan, but the idea is simple and adaptable for the many other gauge swatches we crochet.
Try to crochet them in the same size, gauge and yarn weight. Then when you have enough squares you can assemble them into an afghan, table runner, or scarf. If you use the same colors over and over then you have a coordinating look. If they don’t coordinate then you have a scrap look afghan. This idea works best if you work in one type of fiber, wool or acrylic. It is hard to mix the two since the care for both is different.
I hope that this helps you create one of your own.
Talk to you later,
Karen