Scrappy Yarn Bowl

Every knitter or crocheter will undoubtedly know the pain and suffering associated with working in those annoying ends. I love projects with an absolute explosion of colour so I always seem to have enough ends for the whole of Africa.

I keep promising myself that I'll sew-as-I-go. Despite my good intentions, I never do. I always suffer horribly at the end.

For a while now, I've been storing scraps in a vase. I didn't really have any fixed plan with them, but I figured they would work as stuffing in some of the soft toys I make for charity.

Mr K was complaining the other day about not having a place to put his keys and I decided a bowl made of the pretty scraps would be so much more fun than hiding them inside some cute toy.

When I was a child, my (mostly mad) grandmother used to cook up pots of glue for my cousins, sister and I. We'd stick everything we could find. Life was a lot simpler back then. Small things amused us for hours.

I reckoned if the glue didn't work, we could just toss in a couple of eggs and turn it into a cake. Clearly this is why cake and bread stick to my hips - they use the same ingredients as glue!

The glue recipe is really simple:

• Mix half a cup of flour with 2 cups of cold water
• Add this mixture to 2 cups of boiling water
• Boil for a bit (I stirred as well to prevent lumps, probably about 10 minutes or so)
• Remove from heat and add 3 tablespoons of sugar
• Cool (the glue thickens as it cools)

Select a bowl as a mould and cover in cling film.

Next comes the messy part. If you have a child nearby (or someone you can bribe with chocolate or money), now would be a good time to get him or her to help you. Luckily this glue just washes out of clothes (guess how I know this?) so it's really quite low risk in the permanent mess and destruction category.

Dip each piece of yarn in the glue and remove the excess. I kept mine quite wet. I was already not sure that this would work and had visions of the scraps sliding down the bowl into a clumpy, gloopy mess, so figured more glue would give me more stickability.

Start layering the scraps onto the bowl. Swirl the scraps around, overlapping them.

Surprisingly, the scraps stayed where I put them. Mental fist pump - this may be successful after all. I made sure to press the intersections of the scraps together to ensure maximum chance of sticking.

Keep adding scraps until the mould is evenly covered. I made sure to loop the ends over at the top of the bowl (well, the bottom of this picture as you look at it - but you know what I'm talking about) because I thought that would give it a bit more strength and stability. At this stage I was still not entirely sure that this would work.

This is a good afternoon's work. I'm sure you could shorten the time taken by dipping a few scraps at a time and packing them onto the mould thickly, but it would definitely take a lot longer to dry. As it was, mine took three days.

You could also try a completely different look by wrapping the mould with the pieces and creating a more solid looking bowl. String would also work if you're going for a monochrome look.

Removing the yarn bowl from the mould is a tricky business. Bottom line, getting the cling film off the glass and not breaking the yarn bowl is not easy. There has to be a better way of doing this. I'm not sure whether spraying the glass bowl with cooking spray or perhaps even using a few drops of oil would help, but I'll try that next time.

The yarn bowl is surprisingly strong and rigid. It really is more a decorative piece than functional. It is good to hold keys or small bits and bobs, but I wouldn't go using mine as a fruit bowl.

I made a flat disk with the leftover scraps (that's quite funny - scraps are already leftovers and now we have leftovers of leftovers!) which fits perfectly onto the bowl as a lid (purely accidental - no planning involved there at all) or which can be hung in a drab window.

This was a fun recycling project. Time consuming, yes, but extremely satisfying because I didn't have much faith that it would work.

And the vase is already half full again.