What to do with Sock Scraps?

Sock scraps seem to be an increasing topic of discussion on knitting blogs and podcasts over the past few years. There’s 400 yards of yarn in a standard skein of sock yarn and most of us don’t have size 15 feet and like a cuff that goes halfway up their leg so we tend to have some yarn left over. The question then is what should we do with these partial skeins of sock yarn?

Enter the most popular option: some sort of scrap yarn blanket. The scrap yarn square blanket is a very popular option and many podcasts that I watch had some sort of scrap yarn swap so that people can get different yarns and don’t just have to use the same ones they had previously used to knit socks. There is a crochet granny stripe blanket that is also quite popular as the crochet skills are very basic and it uses up a good amount of yarn per stripe. People also make scrappy socks where they do stripes of multiple sock yarn scraps to make another pair of socks.

Of course, you can always try to find a project that calls for the yardage you have left, but that will most of the time (unless you want to mix yarns) be small child/baby projects and not everyone has a small child/baby to gift the knits. I ended up doing something in the middle. This has been an ongoing project since the end of 2016 when I tried to complete the 2016 Box O’ SoxKAL (hosted by Kristin of the Yarngasm Podcast). I made 7 pairs of socks, falling short of the goal of 12 pairs for the year. But those 7 pairs left me with a good pile of sock scraps. I also started 2017 with more socks and after a couple of shawls and a baby sweater or two I had a mountain of scraps that I needed to do something with. 

 

At first, I was just going to make a sock scrap blanket. I decided to use the Ten Stitch blanket pattern I’d done before because that way I was sure to use up every last bit of yarn. I really dislike wasting yarn, especially when it is a nice indie dyed skein or some luxury commercial skein. I got a couple of rotations done and realized this blanket was going to be tedious and I had so much yarn left over that the color changes wouldn’t come so often and the blanket wouldn’t look how I envisioned it.

So to Ravelry I went! After searching by weight and yardage, hidden among the baby patterns was a pattern for knitted sweater Christmas ornaments. I was smitten and cast on immediately. The pattern is a small raglan sweater that you hang on your Christmas tree. If you had a small enough doll, they could wear the sweater. I made a couple tweaks to the pattern along the way and even made up my own mitten ornament pattern from scratch. These sweaters were my at work knitting project for the past year and I finally finished up the last ones I could make with my current pile of sock scraps. In total, I made 49 sweaters and 10 mittens.

Now, those didn’t completely use up my scraps of yarn, I still had a bit of every yarn left over so I tied them all together and started a new sock scrap blanket (I also unraveled my old one and put those yarns in the new blanket). And it is exactly how I wanted it to look – very scrappy!

I encourage everyone to find new uses for their scrap yarns if at all possible, we all love yarn, and it is fun to find new projects that you might not have thought of trying. I probably never would have started making ornaments with a full skein of yarn, but now every time I have left over fingering/sock weight yarn it is either becoming an ornament or will be going into the scrap yarn blanket. I know this blanket will take years to be finished but that’s okay, whenever it is finished, it will be wonderful and scrappy and a collection of memories of past projects.