Thinking of Yarn Leftovers and Knitting - 16 June 2025

You may recognise the colour of the above balls of yarn. Ages ago I made a pair of socks with the blueish yarn and had 49g left of it. With the second brownish yarn ball I also made a pair of socks and finished them very recently. You can read about that pair here. I weighed each sock of the latter and they were 27g each, ie I used 54g for the pair. The leftover yarn that you can see above weighed 46g.

All these calculations mean that I wouldn’t have enough yarn to knit another whole pair of socks in the same yarn colour, but I could get creative and knit the cuff ribbing, the heel, and the sock toes in a different (contrasting) colour. In this way I’d be able to use as much as possible of that sock yarn.

I felt really happy when I had this realisation because although the yarn was cheap in comparison to other sock yarns, it is nice to squeeze as much as possible out of the same 100g yarn ball. Some people make blankets or even knit toys with leftover sock yarn, I just wanted to make more socks : the yarn is ideal for the purpose and washes well.

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Sadly I didn’t get the opportunity to go out and celebrate Knit in Public Day on Saturday, but I did get a lovely present : three 200g balls of 100% wool yarn ! Below you can see the label:

I was of course very interested in the label : knitting gauge, care instructions and so on.

Snowy Owl is a lovely name for this yarn. I started knitting a test sample straight away as I’m keen to get started on a project:

I’m using size 5mm knitting needles - I’ve only got cable needles that size. I cast on 20 stitches and I’m looking forward to seeing whether I get 16 stitches and 20 rows per 10 cm to be able to make a cardigan with a collar.

Thank you for reading !