My DIY yarn advent calendar

Yesterday I told you about my slow-growing sock yarn blanket, and today I'm going to tell you about my DIY yarn advent calendar, which should help the blanket grow over December, and give me a little much-needed time out during what can be a rather busy month.

I have lots of mini skeins stashed all over the place, so at the weekend I brought them all together and chose 24 to make into an advent calendar. The choice was fairly arbitrary as I'm going to make sure I have at least a couple of positions in the advent calendar open at any particular time to give me a few options on where to put the yarn for a given day. I'm sure it'll all fit together somehow! I also purchased some chocolates for the calendar - chocolate coins and Malteser reindeer, both festive favourites of mine - some pink and white striped paper bags (5 x 7 inches, readily available on eBay) and some festive number stickers from Hobbycraft.

Putting the calendar together was simple: put a skein in each bag until the pile of skeins was all gone, add some chocolates to each bag, then stick the number stickers on the bags, sealing the bags in the process. The bags were all then glamorously thrown in a carrier bag and hidden away until the end of November (I might upgrade them to a Santa sack at the end of the month, or even hang them in the living room on a washing line for all to see).

I'm not totally certain I will keep up with the advent calendar - it's been a long time since an advent calendar held my interest beyond about December 12th - especially as I also have the Paintbox yarns advent calendar to work through in December, but I will try my hardest to keep up!

My sock yarn blanket

Last year I started knitting socks, and every time I finished a pair, I added the spare yarn to a little bag, which rapidly had to be upgraded to a bigger bag, which was stashed in a cupboard for later use. I didn't think about the bag of leftovers very much. I am someone who likes to make projects with very organised colour selections, often with large quantities of a few carefully selected colours, so scrappy socks didn't appeal, nor did knitting and stuffing huge numbers of hexipuffs to make into a quilt. And then I joined Instagram and every few days someone would post a photo of their sock yarn blanket project. 

Apparently the idea stuck, and in January, I started browsing the internet for sock yarn blankets, settling on Tikki's mitred square pattern. The pattern can be worked across any number of stitches, and I had decided that I wanted to use as close as possible to 5 g of yarn per square, so cast on 2 stitches in my favourite sock yarn (Twilight Rainbow by Cuddlebums, on Donegal sock) and worked from the corner, increasing rather than decreasing at the centre until I had used just under 5 g of yarn; there were 42 stitches on the final row, which I cast off, then I picked up and cast on the 42 stitches for the next square.

The project is not a quick one. Squares are added erratically, often five will be added over two days, then none for a month, and at the time of writing, the blanket has 57 squares. I do love working on the blanket though. It's different to everything else I knit, and it gives me a chance to play with different colours of yarn and see how one shade affects another.

The one possible drawback of knitting the blanket is that it gives me a reason to buy mini skeins, which I hadn't considered buying before I started the blanket as I had no use for them, and they have a habit of accumulating! So this year, I have made myself a yarny advent calendar, featuring a mini skein to be knitted into the blanket every day. I'll tell you more about that tomorrow.