handmade by stefanie

The first year I seriously took up knitting, I made scarves and hats for everyone I knew for Christmas. For many years after that, I would spend each year making holiday gifts - toys, socks, bags, you name it. For a few years, I was equally split between gift knitting and so-called "selfish" knitting. (honestly, knitting for yourself really isn't selfish, and neither is crocheting or weaving for yourself, for the record!). As the holiday gift knitting deadline stressed me out more and more, I moved almost entirely towards knitting for myself in favor of (gasp!) giving store-bought gifts for the holidays. However, if you've been knitting long enough, you find there is a limit to how many handmade gifts you can reasonably give, not to mention, how many handmade garments and accessories you yourself can keep. That's when I started taking up sample knitting as a side gig and dabbling in charity crafting. There are certain things I absolutely love to knit, but...

Running out of yarn is something that every knitter (or crocheter or weaver!) dreads, and when you're working with hand-dyed yarn, it can be particularly anxiety-producing.  The natural variations between dye lots means that it's not as simple as finding another skein to use if you run out of yarn before you're done. While those variations might not be noticeable when you're eyeballing the skein, they can be clear as day once you've used that yarn to your project. For this very reason I highly recommend getting an extra "safety" skein when you are buying hand-dyed yarn for a large project. So what if you're trying to destash? That's where things get tricky, because you are most likely substituting in whatever yarn you find in your stash for the called-for yarn in the pattern (I'll cover yarn substitutions at a later date, as this topic was much requested in my reader survey!). To summarize, not all yarn behaves the same way, and yarn weigh...