Handspun Destash Sweater: Part 1

On January 1, I woke up feeling like I had the worst hangover ever. This was odd, since I hadn't partied, and had gone to bed early.  It turned out that after nearly four years of dodging covid, and being fully vaccinated, it had finally caught me. 

Once I was feeling a little bit better, but still isolating to keep my husband to keep from getting sick, I decided to start working on a destash sweater. 

The plan is to do an allover stranded colorwork pattern using leftover handspun from two different sweaters.

First, I dumped all the yarn out on the floor and sorted out the yarn I planned to use. I weighed it to make sure I had enough for a sweater quantity, then sorted by color and value. 

I didn't show this in the video, but it turned out to be really helpful - I used shipping tags to write down the sequence of each color, plus its weight. A lot of the colors are so close in value, that when they get jumbled in my knitting basket, it's hard to tell which is purple #3 or purple #4 - so noting that on a shipping tag attached to each ball of yarn was indispensable. I also noted the weight of each ball of yarn in grams so that I could weigh them as I knit, making sure to reserve enough for the sleeves AND body. 

In the next video, I'll talk more about designing the stranded colorwork pattern for the new sweater, plus how I worked through the design of the sweater itself.