One of the truths about crochet (and perhaps all fiber crafts) is that if you don’t have to move all the time, at some point you will probably accumulate enough yarn that you will have achieved something known as SABLE, or Stash Acquisition Beyond Life Expectancy.

I reached that point some years ago, but despite having many whole skeins of yarn I could be working with, it is the bits and pieces that have captured my attention of late.

Part of it is a desire to use what I have, and part of it is the challenge that involved in transforming wha otherwise might end up in a landfill into an object that serves a purpose.

To my mind, scrap projects have an aesthetic of extreme purposefulness in that they do not happen on accident.

In the case of my scrap projects, yarn scraps must be saved, the ends joined with a knot, and then the whole kit and caboodle must be wound into a ball before it tangles.

Once that is done, then a suitable design must be found so that the yarn scraps achieve their highest and best purpose, and I think that for my shortest yarn bits, I have achieved that with the scrap cats:

But then there are the longer bits, like the ones that resulted in this scrap cat bare patch where I decided to embroider a cat tattoo:

While I was able to put this vagary to good use, I was also reminded of a scrap project I once came across that I found inspiring, but which would need longer strands of yarn than what I typically use for the scrap cats, and to that end I have been assembling no a scrap yarn ball comprised of longer yarn scraps:

To get an idea of the scale of this yarn ball at its current size, I have placed it next to my current front burner scrap cat:

For me, each project is an adventure, and while I seldom know exactly where the journey will take me, I move forward as I must: one stitch at a time.