There has been a recent discussion about "the stash" on the EZasPi list. I have not been able to post. Personally I feel that "stash" is a sign of weakness. I battle with clutter and the idea of purposly hoarding gobs of yarn with no intended project in mind seems boderline sinful. This is not to say that I don't have a stash, it's just that my stash weights on me like a bag of sentimentaly treasured and gendered baby clothes that have a 50% chance of suiting a baby who has not even been concieved.

Which brings me to a little ball of inexpensive carrier yarn- impulse buy at Hobby Lobby from last winter. This super silky Yarn Bee appealed to the nature lover in me and it reminded me of lichen, flecks of green and yellow with grey and bits of pink tossed in. I tried knitting it alone. I tried knitting it with other yarns. I don't know how many swatches I made with it, and none pleased me.

I had some girl color Wildfoote sock yarn scraps left over from a baby surprise jacket (also seen in the My little pony coats) but not enough to make a Fiona sized sweater. So I decided to purchase more Wildfoote in order to have enough to use up the other scraps in the stash... knitter logic right?

A friend (she knows who she is) was working on a cardigan with a folded picot edge and I was dying to try it- so I thought up this little fuzzy fake fair isle design- inspired by a hummingbird nest.

hummingbird nest picture

...which is made of lichen and spiderwebs among other things.

I used the EZ percentage system to knit this from the bottom up- it was quickly obvious that the percentages start to slip at the child size- so instead of 20% for a sleeve- I used 24% and even that is still a little snug at the cuffs.

I also had a design change after doing the lower torso picot edge- I knit the seam together before I began the section with the carrier yarn- which made a flimsy row to support the wayward hem. I hoped that it would sort itself out in blocking which it did- but for the sleeve cuffs I made the inner hem deeper so that the joining would happen where the carrier yarn was already employed and the fabric more stable.

The rest of the construction was very straightforward with several color changes of the Wildfoote yarn. The change from grey base to muted green is almost invisible above the arm join.

The last design detail was a row of k2m1 all the way around before casting off- this mirrored the last row of decreases in the yoke and left a very elastic edge for sewing down the folded picot.

The result is that I almost prefectly consumed the entire ball of yarn bee ... I used up a lot of the remaining pink and almost all of the lilac... and I now have a lot of grey and green left over- and if I did the math I would know that in completing this project I made my stash grow.