Leftover, and not so much

I've finished a couple more hats.

 The above hat was knitted with a single ball of leftover yarn. I love how the yarn striped all on its own, though I'm not so thrilled with the pooling up where the decreases start. The transition from the wider stripes to the narrow ones is a bit jarring. I think maybe I should have switched to plain black yarn for the decreases.  This one is going into the BT'oKT.

While this hat wasn't knit from leftover yarn, it's certainly a testament to why a Big Stash is not always a shameful thing. My grandson (the only boy in a veritable sea of girls) is a big Harry Potter fan. A Harry Potter fan whose feet seem to change size daily. I'm not knitting socks for him until his shoe size stabilizes a bit. But I still wanted to knit something for him, and so I came up with the notion of a Gryffindor hat. I had no deep red (the hat is a bit more burgundy than it looks in the scan) and not enough gold in the leftover bag for the project, so I broke my Leftover-Yarn-Only-Rule and rummaged around in the New Yarn Stash. This yarn is not *new* as in newly purchased, it's *new* as in never used. In fact, these particular yarns are easily 9 years old, from back when I bought yarn willy nilly, as protection against The Great Yarn Drought that never materialized.

So, my while my stash is still embarrassingly large, the upside is that when I needed deep red and gold sock yarn, I rummaged in the boxes and bins, and low and behold,  found deep red and gold sock yarn.

Yay me. And Yay for stashes!

And now I have deep red and gold yarn in the leftover bag.