There. I did it. I’ve managed to use up all the old novelty yarn that I had lying around here, the pile of yarn that I felt was holding me back from moving forward. That pile of yarn, to me, represented a bunch of old, failed ideas. It’s been in my stash for over 7 years now. Ancient times. Every time I’d look at it, I’d think to myself, “Wow, I’ve made nothing…from nothing. What a total waste.”

Two days ago I was on Pinterest and came across a pin of a scarf made from scrap yarn. I’d been thinking about making a mat to put on my desk at the window for kitty. I thought about all that old yarn that I didn’t want to throw away nor use in any actual designs for the website and thought, “Hmmmm…” as I pulled out my hook and yarn bins.

The first one I made with the intention of keeping it here in the office and decided it had to go with the beach vibe I’ve set in place. So I gathered a lot of blues, whites, and blue-greens and one lone nappy orange novelty yarn and went to work.

It’s just a simple single crochet mat in the shape of a rectangle, but I can’t tell you how happy I was in making it!

The next night I decided to use up the remainder of the yarn: lots of reds and pinks with a smattering of yellow, green and blues.

The key is to pick one or two yarns that you have a lot of that you carry through to the end. The other yarns can start and stop organically and the whole mat will still feel like it has unity. I used a huge hook, which I believe it a honkin’ size Q. I could be wrong. It’s not labeled (need to do that). I would have thought it would be yarn to pull the yarn through the loops, but the real challenging part was keeping my “feed” of yarn from tangling, especially when one of the yarns was starting to go.

This whole process was truly cathartic.

Kitty agrees.

Tags: kitty, mat, novelty, scarp, yarn