Stashbusting

I have plans to organise my yarn stash once the girls are back at school next week, following the two-week Easter break as it's in a bit of a mess, with various bags of yarn dotted around the house.

Having had a look in the box that houses all my acrylic DK yarn, I saw that there were quite a lot of part-balls in various colours, left over from other projects.  Some of these balls were 20g; others 50-60g.  I'm also finding that my shoulder's more comfortable with me crocheting than knitting at the moment (and an extremely busy Easter Sunday at work -- it's the busiest day of the year for the Tesco Express where I work because all the big supermarkets are closed for the day -- took its toll on my shoulder as well) so I put all of the pastel, lighter colours of yarn into a bag, along with three balls of cream DK that I'd got, pulled out a 4mm hook and started rippling.

This is what I've come up with:

It still needs an edge, but I'm rather pleased with it.  It's ten 14-stitch ripples wide (using the Attic 24 Neat Ripple pattern) and there are six rows of colour, followed by four rows alternating cream with colour and, as you can see, every other 'block' is cream.  It's a bit lighter than the photo shows; the yellow and green aren't as dark as they seem on screen.  I've now run out of the cream though (it's Hayfield/Sirdar Bonus Baby DK), so will either have to buy another ball or two, which rather defeats the object of stashbusting, or I'll use some cream Stylecraft Special DK that I've got to do a narrow border, which will neaten everything up.

So, having finished the main part of that blanket, I still had light colour yarn left over, so I got out a 4.5mm hook and have started making a version of the Vintage Vertical Stripe blanket (except my stripes will be horizontal!).  This is completely mindless crocheting -- just row after row of treble (double US terms) stitches, going into the space between the stitches of the previous row, rather than going into the V at the top of the previous stitches.   As it's so easy to do while watching television and can be picked up and put down very easily,  it's working up fairly fast.  

Again, the photo looks darker than the blanket is (it's a very dreary day today).  

I'm just crocheting backwards and forwards until the yarn of the part-balls runs out, giving stripes of differing heights.  I had a couple of whole balls and one or two where I'd only used a bit of yarn, so I've wound those into smaller balls which will give more stripes.  I'll put a border around this one as well.  A border makes everything look much neater, don't you think?

I did start a new knitting project, a second Relax sweater, but having done a few rows of the bottom ribbing, I decided I didn't like the cast on I'd used as it was too loose and looked sloppy, so I'm going to frog and start over...... but that can wait until next week when DD2 is back at school.  She had a very good first week of the school holiday, but this week..... well; I'm not sure what's going on with her, to be honest.  Her behaviour has been challenging and she seems to be getting very easily upset by all sorts of noises.  Hopefully once she's back into the routine of school she'll settle down again.  Fingers crossed.