Yummy Sock Yarn.....

.... that's actually made it from skein to needles to being ready to keep my feet warm.

I admit that I'm guilty of hoarding nice sock yarn.  I see a skein, think how lovely it looks,  buy it and then put it away with the other skeins of lovely sock yarn and then, when it comes to knitting myself a pair of sock, often bypass the lovely stuff and go with something else such as Regia (which is nice, but not 'lovely' - I'm sure you know what I mean).

So, a sort-of resolution for 2011 is to knit up the yummy yarns as well as the workaday ones.  I don't mind hand-washing socks as it doesn't take long.  Just pop them in the sink with some warm water and some shampoo, swirl them about a bit then leave them for however long it takes to make and drink a cup of tea.  Socks then out of the sink into the bathtub where they're rinsed using the shower attachment and then back into the sink which now has water and a blob of hair conditioner in it.  Then it's the squeezing in a towel thing before the socks are hung over the slats that make up the bottom shelf of the airing cupboard where they quite happily dry out without further intervention from me.  It sounds a bit of a faff when it's written down, but it's not really.

Anyway, having had four pairs of socks develop holes over the course of a fortnight, it was time to knit new socks for me, so I turned to the yummy yarn bag of yarn and first wound the skein of Outrageous sock yarn from Laughing Yaffle into a ball and away I went. 

These were the result, finished a couple of weeks ago:

Then, I cast on with some sock yarn from Fyberspates and made these:


Both pairs are made using a 2mm metal KnitPro circular and are 64 stitches round as I find that makes a nice, firmish fabric that wears well.  The Outrageous pair are slightly shorter in the leg than the Rhubarb pair.

Ooh, that reminds me.  I don't know if anyone else out there does this, but I always keep track of how many rows I've knitted for the foot and then the leg so I can make each sock exactly the same and I also make the ribbing one quarter the number of rows that I've knitted for the leg.  So, in the case of the Outrageous socks, that was 60 rounds for the leg and 15 rounds of ribbing and for the Rhubarb socks, 64 rounds for the leg and 16 rounds of ribbing.  Others I know knit until they've got x inches or cms rather than counting rows.  Maybe I'm odd!

Onto the next pair of socks now.  I've got 2 balls of Nature Spun fingering yarn - one blue and one jade green - and I'm going to use the Ulmus shawl/stole pattern on the instep and legs.  Just got to do a bit of maths and scribbling on paper to balance the pattern across the stitches.

In the meantime, there's always crocheting to be done on my Granny Stripe blanket (I'll post a picture once I've done one colour repeat) and the cardigan I'm making with the purpley-pink yarn that keeps misbehaving (that deserves a post all to itself!).