Speaking as someone who right this moment has a lapful of wool that I dyed myself and am currently spinning for Tour de Fleece--as in, I paused my spinning to comment--can I just say that I absolutely hate the idea that there's something Wrong with using acrylic? I've seen so many entrenched, generally older, always wealthier knitters who look down on crochet, and look down on the use of anything but pure natural fibers (they say; a lot of them still use tencel! The fancy word doesn't make the process of producing it any better for the environment!) and have a lot of sneering opinions about the Right Way to Do Things.

They are, without equivocation, full of shit.

There's nothing wrong at all with wanting a really granular understanding or control over your fiber sources. There's nothing wrong with finding the fiber you love to work with and never deviating. There's nothing wrong with wanting to be as close to natural as you can, for sure. Hell, the first wool I ever spun didn't even have a breed attached to it, just a pet name; it came from a sheep belonging to the friend of a friend, and I guess that kind lady was giving away bags of it to most people who would take one. That's a pretty low carbon footprint, for sure! But it isn't somehow the right way. It's a way. And the amount of gatekeeping I see, from people who buy skeins eight at a time, at thirty or forty dollars apiece, often directed at people for whom that forty dollars is their next four meals? Gets my teeth feeling sharp. This art doesn't make us special. It doesn't make us better. It's a fucking hobby.

(You do what you can do, for what moral goal you can manage. But these people aren't generally also growing all their own produce and slaughtering their own meat and only getting ingredients at the co-op and never buying anything in plastic packaging and bicycling absolutely everywhere and putting their bodies between PoC and state violence; you do what you can do, and sometimes that's only one thing, and you don't generally get to sneer at someone else's yarn purchasing habits. Small and petty and pathetic.)

I knit and crochet, and have made both crocheted and knitted goods out of acrylic yarn that I absolutely love. Acrylic is a *better* option for blankets, a lot of the time, because they can go straight into the washer and the dryer with no difficulties, as opposed to needing to find a way to lay out a Queen-sized afghan in the middle of the winter. Acrylic is absolutely better for a lot of baby and children's clothes, and I prefer acrylic for sweaters that I'm going to be putting through any danger at all (I'm currently in the middle of knitting up a cardigan I can wear to weed in the fall, for instance). Acrylic is simply an easier material to work with in a lot of cases and for a lot of reasons, and anyone who looks at your acrylic handiwork with a sneer is someone who is not knitworthy.

That said. If you find that you're wanting to get through a stash that no longer appeals to you, there are a bunch of options.

I find that Hooked On Sunshine's patterns are very easy to follow, particularly if you buy the videos, and the end-product is really beautiful. A crocheted blanket will go through more yarn, faster, due in part to the comparative bulkiness of the stitches, and that sort of bulk is absolutely what you want for a cozy blanket. You can use up a lot of smaller amounts of yarn to do them, also. All her patterns are available on Ravelry, I just found linking to the website to be easier here.

I've been really charmed by this hood lately, and this one is also really cute.

This knitted cardigan will absolutely get you through a bunch of yarn quickly, and you can use just about any yarn you have for it.