A number of years ago, at a fiber show, I saw a handspinner who had tied all her leftover single-ply yarns together and plied them to make a skein of odds and ends yarn. She said the technique was really popular. I recall thinking it had a lot of potential, but even though I was just beginning to learn to spin, I thought I could do better.

More recently, I’ve noted the popularity of commercial eyelash and novelty yarns.

In between, I have seen and felt many blends – of fiber, color, and materials – available as yarn, batting, roving, picked fiber, or simply bags of scraps. I’ve even worked with some of them.

I have hoarded odds and ends of fiber, and tossed all the leftovers, trimmed ends, etc. into a bit.

A couple years ago, I started making crocheted flowers for Pam’s paper crafting. Every time I make a crocheted flower, I end up with a piece of cotton crochet thread 0.5 to 1.25 inches long. I make a lot of crocheted flowers in a lot of different colors – many more colors than shown in that picture – and for some reason, I’ve been keeping all those cut ends.

The reason occurred to me a while back – actually, before we bought the house last spring – and I’ve only recently had the opportunity to follow up the project. I wanted to make my own Oddiments and Endiments Yarn.

Odds and ends – pieces of string, chunks of fiber, yarn ends, and other things – carded together and respun.

Using hand cards, I carded the odds and ends I could card. (I’m saving some for when I get the picker.) I carded some cut ends from the crocheted flowers into the fiber and held some out. I then spun the fiber, adding the short cotton ends from the crocheted flowers to the drafting triangle from time to time.

This yarn is a single. The diameter is highly variable and it is full of weak spots. I want to make another funky single like this one and ply the two together.

This yarn is probably more alpaca than anything. It is guaranteed to contain huacaya alpaca, suri alpaca, cotton, cotton crochet thread, acrylic, silk, wool and flash. It probably also contains mohair, pygora, chiengora, ramie, polyester, angora and whatever else I have worked with in the past seven years.

I hope it doesn’t take me five years to accumulate the other half of this future 2-ply skein.