I’ve got a new project on my needles, a scrappy cowl. I needed something completely and totally mindless, something I could knit without looking at 95% of the time. Sometimes at work I go to seminars and talks, and I’m listening but my hands are free, and I wanted a project that I could work on without people thinking I’m not paying attention. Thus, my scrappy cowl idea!

I don’t have enough sock yarn scraps yet to do one in fingering weight, so I decided worsted weight would be my base. I pulled out my bins of yarn balls and started sorting, and it was so much fun. This is going to be like a memory quilt of beloved yarns and projects! It is probably 75% worsted weight, with some Aran weight thrown in, and then I decided I could do a few DK and light bulky yarns too.

The one pattern I looked at suggested tying them all your scraps together to make a yarn ball, but I don’t have the patience for that. I’ll just tie them together as I go, and randomly pull balls from the project bag when I need a new one. I want it to be as random as possible, because it’s really hard for me to relinquish control, even over something as simple as color order. Some of my scraps are bigger than I’d like, so I might not use them all at once. I haven’t really decided yet. I know for sure I’d like to use up all the little scraps, because what else am I going to do with them?

There’s no complicated pattern here. I did a provisional cast on of 56 stitches on 16″ size 8 needles, joined in the round, and started knitting. I’ll knit until it’s long enough to wrap twice or I run out of yarn, whichever comes first. No, that’s not true. If I don’t get it long enough to wrap twice, I’ll just leave it unfinished and add to it as I finish other projects. And someday I’ll have a weirdly beautiful cowl that will go with everything and nothing!