By Sara Joyce
Like many of us, my New Year’s resolution was to knit down my yarn stash, which seriously exceeds my life expectancy. In particular, I sought ways to use the many partial balls left over from other projects to make something beautiful from nothing. If there was a chance to incorporate learning a new technique, all the better. I was interested in projects that would inspire knitters to mix and match leftover yarns to knit something unique and beautiful.
Where to look for inspiration and advice? Books, YouTube, online knitting sites and Ravelry are all possible sources. As a lifelong bookworm, I started at home, in Canada, with knitwear designer Sally Melville. Sally was way ahead of the eco- and wallet-friendly curve when it came to using up stashed and leftover yarns. Her brilliant book, Sally Melville Styles: A Unique and Elegant Approach for Your Yarn Collection, is available on loan from the Toronto Public Library, for sale through the For Sale or Trade tab on Sally’s Ravelry patterns page, or through online independent booksellers ABE.ca and Thriftbooks.com. It includes useful advice on organizing your stash visually to facilitate mixing yarns and colours. If you prefer to learn by video, Sally has an online class on Craftsy.com, Stashbusting Secrets for Sweaters and More, which is packed with useful design tips for mixing yarn weights and colours. See https://www.craftsy.com/class/stashbusting-secrets-for-sweater-knitting-more. Sally’s pattern “Necessary Neutral” is a great example – colourful mitred squares in leftover sock/fingering weight yarns are set off against a pale or dark neutral background in a beautiful wrap in two sizes – no need to worry about fit: https://ravel.me/necessary-neutral.
Another wonderful source of inspiration is 52 Weeks of Scrap Yarn, Laine Publishing’s 2025 entry in their very successful “52 Weeks” series. It is a visually beautiful book, offering a wide array of stunning knit and crochet projects using scrap yarns, ranging from sweaters, to shawls, socks, hats and other accessories, to home decor. A hardcover copy sells for C$70 and is not yet available from the Toronto Public Library, although TPL has many of the previous 52 Weeks series. Before making the investment, I recommend checking out the reviews on YouTube by A Lovely Yarn and Rosemary and Pines Fibre Arts.
Barbara Albright’s Oddball Knitting: Creative Ideas for Leftover Yarn, published in 2004, is a comprehensive resource, offering useful advice and a well-organized index to over 30 new patterns for using leftover yarns of various weights, with a section dedicated to reversible scarves. It’s available on loan from TPL, for sale or trade on Ravelry, and second-hand on ABE.ca and Thriftbooks.com.
The Ravelry.com website offers an absolute treasure trove of scrap yarn project ideas, and I’ll focus on these in Something from Nothing, Part 2, in the June TKG newsletter, along with other sources of online knitting inspiration available to you. Our friends at the amazing member-supported Knitty.com, for example, have been huge supporters of new designs for scrap yarn projects, and I’ll also highlight some of their new patterns next month.
