What can you knit with 24 mini skeins from a yarn Advent calendar? Prosper team member Sarah knows that choosing a project for 24 mini skeins can feel like a big decision. After nearly a year of ideas, experiments and several false starts, she found a simple way to turn our 2025 Advent into something beautiful—and genuinely useful.
Words and knitting by Sarah.
So you have pre-ordered your 2026 yarn Advent calendar and in a few short months a beautiful, curated parcel will arrive on your doorstep!
Are you the sort to open it all at once? Maybe you'll have great restraint and open one numbered parcel each day. And then what? Do you have a project planned, ready to cast on day one? Or will you wait to see how the colours unfolds and pick the perfect project in the New Year?
So many options, all of them good!
My approach to Advent is slow. There’s a lot of mahi that goes into these mini skein sets, which makes the yarn feel especially precious. Last year, it took me a while to get past the hurdle of finding the ‘perfect’ project and simply enjoy the yarn!
Being a member of the Prosper team meant that there was no element of surprise for me in our 2025 Advent, Field Notes of the Southern Wild. You would think knowing the colours in advance would make it easier to plan a project, but no. I bounced between ideas for almost a year!
Eventually, I came up with a brief. I wanted something that would: use all 24 colours together, feel at home in my lounge and, most importantly, be fun to knit!
Planning complete. Now for the trail and error phase.
I cast on and frogged several blanket patterns over the course of a few months.
Attempt one: I was overthinking the colour order.
Attempt two: The pattern was confusing, making the knitting a slog.
Attempt three: It was huge and felt too daunting.
Finally, I decided to keep it simple: a garter-stitch lap blanket with an engaging construction, using the colours in the original Advent order. Phew!
Enter the Prism blanket, a free pattern from Purl Soho.
This modular blanket is made one triangle at a time, which makes it a lovely project for a yarn Advent calendar. I used one 20g Prosper DK mini skein for each triangle and kept a small amount in reserve, no yarn chicken this time!
I used the recommended needle size, but increased and decreased to 10 fewer stitches than the pattern stated. This comfortably got me to the lap blanket size, measuring approximately 1 x 0.75 metres.
This was such a fun project to work on, it took just a few weeks of evening knitting because I couldn’t put it down!
The finished blanket is surprisingly useful, too. I found the bouncy Prosper DK base provides the perfect squish for a blanket. It has just enough memory to drape, without being slinky.
For years, I have put off knitting a blanket because I had a mental block thinking it must be gigantic or it wouldn’t be worth having. But this size is lovely to snuggle under.
Whoever is first up in the morning wraps it around their shoulders like a shawl and in the evenings, it is the perfect layer for sofa knitting.
I will be making more lap blankets!
In the meantime, I’ll continue pondering what to do with this year’s Advent.
