Frugality and Creativity

Frugality seems to be ingrained deep in my nature.  I balk at paying full price, and love to shop at second-hand or thrift stores, to find things I can use at a reduced price.  So I often find myself hesitating at paying full price for yarn, especially since I began occasionally buying yarn wholesale.  But sometimes a yarn is just so special or so beautiful, that I allow myself to splurge a bit. 

Last year, I found myself eyeing some balls of Patons Kroy Socks, a lovely variegated yarn with beautiful colorways.  I think it was even on sale, and I had a pattern to use it for.  But the problem was, that even on sale, I would have to pay twice as much to make this pattern, because the yardage was less per ball.  The yarn I have typically used for my Scalloped Crocheted Fingerless Gloves is Red Heart's Heart & Sole, which has 213 yds. per 50g ball; but the Kroy Socks only has 166 yards.  This meant that I would likely need two balls.  I wrestled with the decision, but finally gave in and bought two balls.

Scalloped Crocheted Fingerless Gloves

As I began making the gloves, I enjoyed seeing the interplay of color.  The yarn was enjoyable to work with, and I soon had completed a pair of gloves.  But it seemed like there was still quite a bit of yarn left.  It seemed such a waste not to use it for something!  And this started the creative juices flowing.  I mulled it over, and decided to try making a pair of knitted gloves with the remainder.  I made a gauge swatch, and selected a pattern stitch, then hopefully cast on.  After knitting ribbed cuffs, I switched to the pattern stitch, and shortly thereafter started the thumb shaping. 

When I had completed the glove, I weighed it and the remaining yarn.  It would be close!  The completed gloves used up all but a short length of the yarn.  But what a satisfying feeling to get a second pair of gloves out of the two skeins of yarn! 



The completed knitted gloves

Sometimes frugality forces us to use our creativity.  If I hadn't been so frugal, I never would have created this second design.  Hooray for frugality!

"How did I do that...?"

I love learning and developing new knitting and crochet techniques.  Occasionally I will just pick up yarn and needles or hook, and play.  This can either be exhilarating, or extremely frustrating, depending on whether my idea "works" or not.  I will often start with an existing technique, and play a "What If?" game.  What would happen if I wrapped the yarn a different way, or combined elements of two different stitch patterns, or tried to imitate a knitting technique in a piece of crochet (or vice versa)...?


Earlier this year, I decided to use some yarn from my stash to make some fingerless gloves, which seem to be all the rage at the moment (The aforementioned gloves rapidly disappeared at the bazaar last weekend!).  I decided to crochet the gloves, but wanted to add some special touches to make them unique. 

I had been playing around with crocheted foundation rows, and had come up with some interesting ideas.  A foundation row is used in place of the starting chain at the beginning of the work, and is basically a way of crocheting the chain and the first row simultaneously, which seems to avoid the problem of a tight chain at the beginning edge of the work.  This experimentation (a "beaded" foundation row which I hope to use in a future project) sparked the idea to try creating a scalloped foundation row to begin the gloves.  I liked the way this looked.  The great thing about this is that the same scalloped edging can be used at the other end of the gloves, as a standard edging.  What fun! 

The Scalloped Foundation Row

The Edging at the Other End of the Glove

Sometimes I am too clever for my own good, though.  If I neglect to write out how I did a technique at the time that I create it, I may have a hard time deciphering it when I later try to duplicate it.  Last weekend, I picked up one of my products at the bazaar and said, "How did I do that...?"  Hopefully, I wrote it down, and maybe one day I will find it among the sheaves of scribbled-upon paper that comprise my pattern "library". 

To continue my story, a couple of months ago, a lady convo'd me on Etsy to ask if she could buy the pattern for my fingerless gloves.  I told her I would try to get it ready to publish, but I didn't know if I had written down the pattern.  A vigorous search yielded no sign of a pattern.  So I pulled the gloves out of my stock so that I could re-crochet them.  True to form, when I examined the gloves, I asked myself, "How did I do that?"  It took me a couple of days to figure out what I had done!

But I finally did manage to recreate the gloves.  Here are a couple of photos of the finished product:

By the way, I did finally get the pattern written and published:

Fingerless Glove Pattern on Etsy

If you prefer, the pattern is also available as a download on Ravelry.com:

Fingerless Glove Pattern on Ravelry