Everything deserves a second chance—especially good yarn. This pair of knitted mittens started with yarn that already had a story—as a fingerless mitt sample and a gauge swatch—and then found its way into these mittens.
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| Finished mittens and remaining yarn. |
The fingerless mitt already had its moment… as a sample. It also was a single mitt and had no mate. The gauge swatch had already fulfilled its mission.
Reclaiming the yarn
The yarn that was used in these samples is a cotton/superwash merino/silk/seacell blend in a lovely blueish-green color [color name: storm]. Much too beautiful to let languish in the stash as a sample or a swatch! Time to reclaim and repurpose.
The sample mitt was knit flat and seamed. Once the side seam was unpicked, frogging [unraveling] and rewinding began.
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| Flat sample ready for frogging. |
Frogging and rewinding the yarn from the gauge swatch was easy.
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| Reclaiming the yarn from a gauge swatch. |
Because of my yearlong mitten knitting charity project, I combined the reclaimed yarn with a few other leftover bits, to set the stage for a new opportunity. These unneeded samples had found a new purpose.
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| Recovered yarn (dark green) and two other leftover yarns. |
Colorwork: a little yarn, a big impact
The mittens started with a corrugated ribbed cuff in two colors. Although a little more time-consuming to knit (simultaneously working a different yarn in each hand), the corrugated ribbing shows off two contrasting colors, provides texture, and adds a colorful detail to the mittens.
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| Three-color mittens with a corrugated ribbed cuff, and stranded colorwork. |
With a few rounds knit after the thumb gusset, I introduced the white yarn with stranded colorwork in a geometric pattern. This ditsy design makes the most out of a small amount of yarn, is gender-neutral, and the pattern—with a 4-stitch repeat—divided evenly into the 32 stitches I had on the needles. It was a fun challenge to see how far the reclaimed and leftover yarns could go.
A new story
The yarn had a story prior to knitting these new mittens, and now it’s carrying that story forward into a new one. While participating in September Textile Love this month, the Day 4 prompt was “Story-telling.” Several of the participants cited that part of the story of any textile piece is the story and meanings contained in the materials themselves—the breed of sheep from which the yarn is spun, the country that raises the animals or grows the fibers, the people that weave the cloth. Another chapter to that story is where the maker purchased the materials or how they came upon having them—while on a trip, on holiday, gifted from a friend, a thrift store find, etc. So many layers to its story!
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| Remaining yarn after knitting the mittens. |
The story continues
Perhaps one of my favorite things about stash buster projects is that nothing really has to be the end of the road. A project can be unraveled, re-cut, reimagined, and made into something entirely new.
There’s still a little yarn left over from making these mittens. So apparently, this story isn’t quite finished yet!
