ombre-inspired knit scarf

I know, I know. It's spring already. 

In light of the cold-front that the weather man promised us, coupled with the horrifying realization that I had not knitted or crocheted a single stitch this past winter, I made a scarf. I may not get to wear it until next November, but I made it & I like it. 

This little project, like the needle case I made earlier in the month, was made entirely from the leftovers of other projects. You guys, I'm embarrassed by how much yarn I have collected. It's not like I have nice, full skeins of yarn lying around just waiting to be used. No no, I have dozens & dozens of teeny, tiny balls of yarn. I even have about 30 inches of yarn from a scarf I made back in high school. That was like forever ago. I may be a yarn-hoarder.

It was time for a purge, so I laid out my yarns to find similar colors (the above picture in no way reflects my entire yarn collection. This is only a small fragment. Someone call A&E). I had a lot of blues & some whites & blacks. I wouldn't call this an "ombre" scarf per say (the transitions between colors are too clunky for that title), but it's certainly "ombre-inspired." While I had a variety of colors that worked together, I didn't have a similarity in weights.

The key to using a variety of different yarns is to keep the thickness the same. This means doubling or tripling up on your skinnier yarns to match the stockiness of your thickest yarn. If you look at the "ombre" picture with all my yarn laid you, you can see I had already separated my very thin black into three balls of yarn so I could knit with three threads at a time.

One of the pluses to knitting a "bits-n-pieces" scarf is you really don't have to keep track of your row count. You just knit until you run out. I did a simple knit one, purl one for the entirety of the scarf, tying my ends together as I ran out.

If you're looking to use up your yarn with a scarf like this one, try & pick colors that work well together. Pick colors with the same temperature (warm, cold), or similar hues in the same color family. Alternatively you could pick colors that are totally wacky together for a funkier look. Just remember to double up to the largest yarn size, & knit on with the confidence that you are putting your scrap yarn to good use.

xoxo,
-m.e.

Related // Some more scrap yarn put to use by making pom-poms.