The Puzzle

So what do you do when you have a skein of multicolor chunky single-ply yarn that's pretty but doesn't have enough yardage to really do anything with?  

What if you have another ball that's a lace-weight solid color yarn that you don't yet have a project for?

What if you try to combine them? What size needle would you use?  What would you make with them?

It's kind of a fun project to figure out. 

For me, I decided to do a cowl. The chunky would be nice and warm and the lace-weight would allow me to add some nice details. 

I started off with a sort of in-between needle size but quickly realized that it was going to be way too small for the chunky. Since I was going to be doing a lacy insert into plain stockinette, I realized I could use different size needles for each of the yarns with very little effort and bridge the gap that way. 

So I did stockinette for the chunky using size 8-9 needles and then I transitioned to size 4 needles for the lace. 

For the lace I did a really simple, super lacy old lace pattern called "faggoting" which is simply doing 1 round of yarnover/knit 2 together and 1 round of knit. These 2 rounds are repeated as often as needed to make it the length you want. 

I did a few short sections in the bottom before knitting a long center section, basically to use up the whole skein. 

I was going to do a long lace section before doing the edging but I got bored so it was shorter. This was one occasion I was glad of my sometimes short attention span because it came out much better. 

I used a little 8-stitch VanDyke edging from the 1846 Cornelia Mee book to edge it (which took forever!) so it ended up like this. 

It turned from being a snood to a lacy neck warmer and I love it. 

So go explore your stash and try your hand at combining 2 different yarns that you might not have thought to put together. See what you come up with!