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.