As many of you know, it’s not hard to accumulate a lot of yarn scraps of different amounts from different projects. In the interest of knitting down as much of my stash as possible over the last few months, I’ve started getting creative in terms of how those scraps are used up.

For starters, letting go of whatever weight the yarn is. It’s so easy to hold the yarn double upon itself or with another skein (or several) to manipulate the weight so that different patterns can be worked. I think this is the whole point of Stephen West’s Penguono and know it’s the point of projects such as Tincanknits Marley. I’m a huge fan of the marled look, so this technique is a lot of fun because it allows me to play with color.

If I’m honest, playing around with color seems to be the main motivator for working through my scraps. For this reason, I opted to do a couple different style yokes for two recent baby sweaters. The first uses up a mini skein pack to create thick stripes and the second is a color block yoke from the leftover messenger henley yarn.

The biggest thing I’ve played around with recently, however, has been sleeve length (Note: All of these sweaters use Flax by Tincanknits. I made my nephew a short sleeve baby sweater and cranked out two 3/4 length sleeve baby sweaters for a couple friends who are expecting. The short sleeve sweater wasn’t anything new, however, the 3/4 length was.

While a part of me thinks 3/4 length sleeves on a baby may be silly, the other part of me thinks its genius. Hear me out, our kiddo still fits in her newborn sweater at a year. It does, however, look silly because the sweater now looks purposefully cropped and the sleeves look like they’re the wrong length. By making them 3/4 length from the beginning, they are now poised to grow purposefully cropped. AKA the newborn sweater how has the power to get more wear out of it because knit fabric stretches and the sleeves won’t look funny! I’ve asked my friends to report back, but I feel as though I’ve hacked the system!