FO: Stockinette Socks

Yarn: Claudia's Handpaint
Color: bearded iris (purples and tans)
Pattern: none, basic sock
Needles: Crystal Palace Size 1 Bamboo dpns



Sorry I do not have a better picture. It was all I could do to take my shoes off amid the swirling snow -- maybe when spring comes back, you'll get to see the whole socks.

I was not terribly happy knitting with the Claudia's Handpaint. I loved the colors in the skein, then the first sock turned out well -- I'd promised myself that I would lovingly accept whatever the variegation chose to do, and was not disappointed with the nice spiral-y outcome. However, with the second sock I was conscious of not tightening up my gauge and thus overcompensated and loosened it, which resulted in some very very bad pooling. I ripped back to the point where it became noticeable and continued on with tighter gauge, getting the good spiraling. I don't mind non-matchy socks at all, and if the part where the dark purple/dark brown was pooling hadn't looked like a bruise that would probably rise to the level of medial emergency, I would have left it. Further on I noticed that there is a lot more bad grayish-purple and unnatural tan/gray/brown where the colors overlapped in the second skein. What I did really like about the spiraling was how the dark brown showed up next to the dark purple and ditto for the lighter shades. The tan/lavender juxtaposition is very pretty.

Another problem with the knitting part was the splittiness. I can't count the number of times I innocently, and without violence, stuck the needle into a stitch only to hear threads breaking. Eek - that can't be good for the structural integrity of the sock, right?

So yes, all of that was bad, and after I wove in the final end I would have told you that I wasn't planning on using this kind of yarn again.

But then I put them on.

And they are soft.

Oh man. I didn't know handknit socks could feel soft. They always just felt like socks. But several times today I found myself noticing how nice these feel against my skin.

So, overall I kind of feel like these socks rock the ugly -- I could see people looking at them and finding them ugly (that's the ugly part), but I like them (that's the rock part).