At the heart of stashbusterology is matching a pattern or project with the perfect yarn. An added bonus is the perfect person to gift the object to! I had a stash trifecta this winter with a pile of vintage rug yarn (from my mother-in-law’s stash), the pattern, and my step-step-daughter’s two little dogs.
Knowing I had this “rug yarn”–scratchy, stiff and larger than #4–when I saw this pattern I thought of it immediately.
However, the rug yarn was thicker than the yarn called for in the pattern and I wanted to use up multiple different colors. How to make sure I had enough of the main colors to make it work??? First I swatched and got an idea of how big the bone in the middle would be if I followed the chart and that seemed reasonable. Then I decided to cut down the background area to leave only a two stitch border, since I wasn’t sure I would have enough of the same color of pink to work the intarsia section.
After working the intarsia section, I started working in rounds until I ran out of the main color of pink yarn. After that I kept working rounds of different colors of the pink yarns (as many as I had yarn for) and ended with three more rounds of white. All of these decisions were made on the fly based on how it looked. Alternating the darker and lighter colors seemed to look the best.
Around and around and around we go, where I’ll stop… 
Does this pile look smaller to you?
I didn’t use all the yarn, but I made a project–and made it work with the yarn I had. And I even exported it from the premises. Stashbusterology at it’s finest!
What tips do you have for modifying patterns to make them with a different/unknown amount of yarn? What types of patterns work best for that (I am thinking center out shawls…)?
stash mosh 