It's all squares this week...

June has been a slow yarn month for me and I don't know that this coming week will be much different.  

It's been a good month - doing good things (for myself and others).  Some new things have presented themselves.   Some things I've written about, some I've not.  While I know part of the reason I've lagged in interest in working with yarn is due to busyness, I also know I've lost some steam for some reason.   But then I've also been reading more and that kind of interferes with holding a hook and yarn.  😉  Hopefully this lag I'm in will change, or I'll figure it out and recalibrate.  At the moment, I'm feeling a bit rudderless.  It's weird.

All that said, though, earlier this week I managed to get all those crazy ends woven in on my BAMCAL square.  It's not going to require a hard blocking, so softly steaming this Flying Colors square is going to suffice for now (maybe forever):

Not my favorite square (because of my color choices and placements),

 but it will make a decent contribution to a larger blanket someday.

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Even though I haven't crocheted much this month, my knitting needles have continually had a dishcloth on them.  While it seems pretty uninspiring to report, over the course of the last three weeks I turned this (and some other odds and ends):

Into this:

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Now, if you're like me, when making dishcloths, you end up with lots of little odds and ends of cotton yarn left over.  Sometimes those odds and ends are too small to do much with, but I got to looking at some bags of these leftover bits of cotton yarn and I wondered how it would work to splice some of the yarns together into "magic balls" and make more cloths from them.

Playing it safe, I pulled together two different, but coordinating variegated yarns and did a braided join. 

Here's a picture that shows what that braided join looks like:

Basically, you take two ends of two different yarns, loop them around each other, split each into two sections (doesn't matter how many plies are in a section).  Then braid each side (the three sections of the braid will be the two split sections from one strand of yarn, and one whole strand of yarn).   Do this braiding on both sides of where you looped the yarns together and then wind it into one ball.  Then just keep adding different yarns and colors to a ball until it's the size you want.  Those stringy ends can get snipped off once you've knit or crocheted your item together (I made a little knot of those stringy ends before snipping, but I doubt it's necessary).  

If you want the braided section to more completely blend in, do this braiding at a section in each yarn where the color is as similar as possible.

Anyway...  I knitted up my magic ball and this is what I got:

Kind of cool, I think.  Definitely fun to watch it grow as I knit.  It would probably be even more fun if I combined more disparate colors into one "magic ball".   😀

Oh my goodness...  after posting I decided to look to see how others might do a braided join.  I found this video!  I like her method even better than what I came up with.  

While some may think the braiding isn't worth the effort, to me it was a small thing I could do while my mind was on something else, or my ears were tuned into something completely unrelated to what I was doing with my hands.  And when the item is finished there are no ends to weave in!  Magic!  😃

I'm starting to pull together other scraps of yarn to do this with (and regretting all that I've thrown away over the years).  I suspect variegated or a combination of solids and variegated will work the best with this.  I look forward to finding out.  

And that, dear reader, is all I've got!

2019 Yarn Stash-Down progress:  47.06/100 skeins!