Socks and Scrap Yarn

My son needed new socks. He had outgrown the old ones. I had the better part of a skein of yellow sock yarn. That should be enough, right? Wrong. As I started on the second sock, my son hit a growth spurt. That yellow yarn wasn't nearly enough, and I had no more of it. What to do?

I took out the foot beyond the gusset in the first sock, and made thick stripes using the yellow sock yarn and some navy tweed leftover from a pair of socks I had just finished for myself. Then I copied the stripe pattern on the second sock. They fit my son with room to spare! Mission accomplished!



...almost

I have socks that fill the need that I had, but they don't look good. They looked like I set out making yellow socks and didn't have enough yarn. Now what?

I looked around at my stash and found a little ball of size 10, white crochet cotton. Hmmm. If you don't look too closely at the socks, they look like black and yellow stripes. Sounds like a bee to me, and bees need wings. So I ad libbed two pair of white bees' wings out of the cotton, sewed them onto the socks and added a smiley face and antennae to the toe of each sock. Now my son has bees on his feet. Even my husband thinks they are really cute! I could even imagine doing this with different colors to produce butterflies, lady bugs, and other critters.



And how did I make the wings?



Using #10 cotton and US size 2 knitting needles:
CO 10
Row 1: k
Row 2: k1, inc 1, k to last st, inc 1, k1.
Rep these two rows until you have a total of 18 sts. K 1 row, and then place the first 9 sts of that row on a holder.
Over the rem 9 sts, k 4 rows even.
Next row: k1, k2tog, k to last 3 sts, k2tog, k1.
Next row: k
Rep these 2 rows until 5 sts rem. BO.
Rep for rem 9 sts on holder.
Make a total of 2 per sock.



The moral of the story? If you want to make a "scrap yarn project," but are afraid that the emphasis will wind up on the "scrap" end of it, find ways to embellish the project (either with add-ons or with interesting stitches/textures/shapes built in) that will draw the eye to something else.

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