Recently I have been using a lot of my sock yarn leftovers in scrappy socks and blanket projects, which has been great but has meant that my supply of smaller scraps has dwindled somewhat.

So when I ran out of sock yarn scraps I shifted my attention to my bag of larger amounts of leftovers. I think we all have a bag of these somewhere - those balls where you have started something and frogged it, or used an annoying 30-40% of it - rendering it not much use for a full pair of socks or a shawl.

I dug out these contrasting greys and a burnt orange from my stash - I had around 60-70g of each of them and decided to knit a larger version of my Fuss Free Festival shawl in suitably seasonal colours..

I knew that I wanted stripes but I couldn’t decide on how to arrange them and I spent more time than I care to admit using a random stripe generator, playing with colour orders until I went a little dizzy.

Then I hit on the idea of ‘borrowing’ one of my sons D20 dice from his Dungeons and Dragons set and rolling each time I wanted to change colour - with the number on the dice corresponding to the number of garter ridges I would knit.

I didn’t want a hard line at each colour change so I phased in the new colour by knitting 2 rows of the new colour and then 2 rows of the old colour before rolling the dice to determine how wide the next stripe should be.

I was really pleased with how it turned out and I got so carried away that I ended up digging out some more grey from my leftovers bag (happily it turns out I have no shortage of grey). And in the end the shawl weighed in at a very pleasing 210g.

It’s is wonderfully warm and wrappable and might just have converted me to the way of the larger shawl. It’s big enough to be cosy, without being too big (thinking of some of those 3-4 skeins monsters that almost wear me, rather than the other way round).

Either way, it’s become a staple of my autumn wardrobe and I can definitely see another one or two in my future. I think I might need to buy my own D20 dice though - as my son has been making noises about needing his back.