Stash burning!

I have a confession to make – I have a ridiculously large stash of yarn in my loft. When I say large, I really mean large – at the moment it fills 10 stacking boxes, a bin bag, and a big crate. In my defence, I didn’t buy most of it. I live in the town where Patons’ yarns were originally produced, and when the mill closed down my mum bought up loads of the stock. As she doesn’t knit much, I took at lot of it off her hands. Then other people found out that I knit, and offered me their excess stash. Then there’s Freecycle, charity shops, etc etc – the stash just keeps growing!

Over on Ravelry there’s a thread where people are flashing their stash, posting a photo of the whole thing altogether. I couldn’t do that without some major reshuffling, but I decided to have a look in the boxes and see if I could actually use some of it. As it happened, I found five big 250g balls of baby acrylic yarn, which I had bought when Aldi was doing a craft offer. I’ve knitted in the past for the charity Bonnie Babies, so I decided to use up the yarn by making some clothes for them.

For those who haven’t heard of them, Bonnie Babies are a brilliant Scottish charity who make clothes for premature babies in hospitals, as well as blankets and burial garments for the little ones who sadly don’t make it. They send to hospitals all over the UK, to a neonatal unit in Rwanda, and to Blythswood Care as well. They’re being supported by John Lewis in Edinburgh and Glasgow, so if you’re in the area you might see their patterns and information on display in the stores. I dug out some premature sized patterns and got knitting, starting on May 11. I finished the last ball today (well, I cheated a bit – about 75g of the white was so tangled up that I threw it away) so that’s almost 1250g of yarn used in less than a month!

Now I’m going to finish up my other projects currently on the go, and I also have a baby gift to make for a little boy who was born the other day. Then I’ll have a look through the stash and see if I can clear some more out of the way – leaving me room to buy more of course!