As you may know, I really love to think of ways to use up my yarn scraps. It’s really hard to throw away all those scraps of lovely yarn , especially when some of them might be 5 inches long. But what do you do with those beautiful pieces of yarn? I shared the two ways I’ve used my scraps in the past here. And today I’m sharing a third way to use your scraps. This method is best for all those longer pieces of yarn that are just short enough to not want to use them in a weave.
So what are we doing? We’re going to use that weaver’s knot technique (which you can find the steps for here) and make ourselves some scrap yarn!! To make your scrap yarn the most appealing, I recommend sorting your scraps by colors. I didn’t only pick yarn scraps that matched, but I did focus on cool toned colors, with the exception of a yellow that went with my lime green.
Going through your scraps is a great time to pick out colors that you might not normally put together. If you lay them out next to each other you can get a feel for the color palette. That you’re making.
Also for making scrap yarn, I recommend not going shorter then around 5 inches, just because you’ll have a lot more tying to do. But if you don’t mind tying your yarns together then don’t worry about it.
I laid out the colors I wanted to use and then began tying my scraps together using a weaver’s knot. Once you have a good strong knot, but the yarns ends very close to the knot. As you weave, make sure to pay attention to the knots and hide them behind the warp thread. This might require you to loosen or pull your warp thread a bit tighter. When in doubt it’s better to loosen the thread so that you don’t pull in your weave sides.
I chose to weave my scrap yarn in the round using a twill weave, but you can weave with it anyway you like. I really love working with scraps because the end product is much more of a surprise. I tied my threads how I thought would look nice, but once woven up, it changes how the colors work with each other and it’s a nice free-form of weaving.
Here is a quick review of the weaver’s knot steps, and here is a visual step-by-step.
step 1| taking your old thread end, make a loop.
step 2| bring your new thread end through the loop of the old and across the top of the old thread
step 3| then bring the new thread under the old thread end tail
step 4| finally bring the new thread through the loop again, this makes the knot
step 5| Pull both ends of the threads in the opposite direction to tie the knot, making sure to pull each thread hard so that the knot tied is tight.
The bonus to doing this scrap yarn weave…I only had two ends to weave in! My starting yarn end and then the very last yarn end. Otherwise all the joins were tied and cut close, I should definitely being using weaver’s knots going forward! Yep, that’s the back of the weave pictured up there.
Oh, and if I could mention a tip. I tied my threads together to about 3 arm lengths long (yep wrapping my thread from my elbow to my hand is how I normally measure it out). I noticed that if I tied up my threads any longer, then it was harder to weave with, so when I got closer to the end of my first length of tied thread, I then tied some more on and that worked really well for me.
Oh and if you’re looking for more yarn scrap ideas, I have two other ways to use them here.
If you try this yourself, I would love to see what you make! Feel free to leave a link below or tag #TWLtutorials in Instagram! I love to see what you are working on. Have you tired the weaver’s knot in your own weavings?
Happy Weaving!
Kate
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