Having worked through all my stash over the last few months during my Use it or Lose it campaign inspired by Lynne Rowe, I now know just what I have in my stash and I know that less than 10% of my yarn stash has any man made content. Actually I have 9 skeins only and I am pretty pleased with this because I am also trying to eliminate plastic use in general.   So, knowing how little I now have in my stash, I think I have my plastic use in yarn under control – if not yet quite out of my life.  I plan to stop using any of this once this small stash of acrylic and nylon blends is extinguished. I can hear some sock knitters shouting that socks need nylon! But they don’t; there are some pretty tough hardwearing natural fibres out there such as this from Triskelion Yarns.

There are other ways I can use my yarn craft to help reduce plastic use in my life and waste in general. So today I am starting a series of blog posts about how I use yarn craft to do this – maybe it will help you too.

Remember this blog post when I showed some dishcloths and a few cosmetic pads that I made from cotton DK.  I am pretty proud of the fact that I haven’t bought any cosmetic  pads for over 8  years – I have likely saved almost 100 packets of cotton wool pads – that’s a lot of landfill and a lot of plastic packaging.

If you have cotton yarn and a hook – then it’s pretty easy and quick to make these and think of the difference this can make. The thing I love about these is whenever I have a little bit of dk cotton yarn left over I can just make one or 2 of these – so it’s using those bits of yarn that are so small they may end up in the bin.  That’s exactly what I did this week when I used up some cotton yarn remnants.

The pattern is free and is available on Ravelry here, and it is available also on LoveCrochet and Craftsy.    I checked this morning and I have had thousands of downloads of this free pattern over the years.  And it made me think – just how much landfill and how much plastic has been saved by this little pattern?   So I did some estimating and, if only 1% of the people who downloaded the free pattern used it the same way as me, then I estimate it has saved at least 5000 packets of cotton wool pads – that’s amazing!   If everyone who downloaded it had done the same then that’s half a million!!!!! So my final estimate is somewhere between 5000 and half a million – not very accurate, but pretty inspiring whatever the number.

Just one little pattern has probably made quite a big difference, so if we all tried to do our bit to save waste and not use plastic think what we could achieve!

Happy crocheting xxxx