Awesome Blog Post for Diminishing your Stash!

I came across a FANTASTIC one-stop shopping kind of blog post yesterday as I was searching for patterns for 220 yards of yarn or less:  Simple Knits: "653 Patterns to Knit with 1-285 Yards of Yarn!".  It's a few years old, so some of the links no longer work; but for the most part it's pretty handy.  It's difficult for me to look at the yardage on a skein and think: "Hey, that's just enough to make an elephant!" or something like that.  So, this little gem of a blog post breaks down what you can do with 285 yards or less, and that's a pretty great stash-busting resource, if you ask me, especially since my stash over-floweth right now.  OR, if you participate in a Ravelry group that swaps yarn each month, here are some ideas to put that surprise that you received in the mail to good use.  So, thank you Vicki from Northern Indiana.  You are a saint!

Oh, and another stash-buster, I think, if you can master the less-than-rhythmic flow of it, is the Knit One Below method. I learned how to do this (thank goodness for Youtube.com because the directions in the book were rather sketchy and disorienting) during my vacation, and my daughter will be getting a blanket for Barbie's townhouse bed out of it.

Despite my disdain for this technique, I will say that it does seem to suck up the yarn and you can do multiple colors--probably as many different colors as you want to include--in a single panel.  The result is a striped pattern of some sort--most of the patterns in the book have a vertical solid stripe and a vertical variegated stripe.  My initial efforts (and this is after many tear-outs because if you make a mistake you are mostly out-of-luck and have to start over) are rather novice in appearance; but that my be the best that there ever is for this technique as far as my knitting is concerned.