Birthday Yarn

Woo HOO:



Socks that Rock in Hoofle Foofle, Silkie Watermelon Tourmaline, and Twisted Lunasea. I looked high and low (on the internets, that is) for projects done with the Twisted line of STR, and came up with nothing, nothing at all. It's a nice worsted-weight yarn, and comes in at a whopping 560 yards/skein. I have no idea what I'm going to do with it. Maybe once my Ravelry invite comes through I'll be able to see what other knitters are doing with it, if anything.



These are Lisa Souza Sock! Merino in Sage and Gendarme. I have almost no solid-colored sock yarn, am always instead taken with the variegated, and so the sage will do nicely for a lace pattern. I also got Favorite Socks, so I'll have a lot to choose from. I'd been thinking the Sage would be good for Snicket, but it actually looks a bit too dark in person.

This influx of sock yarn has made me both very happy and very motivated to keep the socks moving off the needles. So, yesterday and today I worked on the cuff of the first Flutter-by sock, in Ashabee's merino/tencel Sugar 'N Spice:



Because I'm a sucker for the variegated yarns, I've been giving lots of thought to how to make them work. Forgive me if this is obvious and I'm un-venting here, but it seems like the problems with pooling and all other unwanted patterning happens when the pattern of variegation lines up in a regular way with the pattern of the sock. So, when combining a very regular color pattern with a very regular stitch pattern, you need to find a gauge at which the stitch pattern won't match up with the color pattern to avoid all the vertical weirdness.

By "regular pattern," I mean a pattern that uses about the same amount of yarn for every row - stockinette would be the most basic, but regular ribbing and seed stitch would also count. The genius of the Monkey sock pattern, and patterns like Flutter-by, then, is the fact that each row uses a slightly different amount of yarn.

Helping even further with this sock is the fact that I can't seem to go three repeats without screwing up the pattern (knitting when I should be slipping, and vice-versa) on at least one needle. That goes a long way toward de-regular-ifying (sorry, English language) the yarn usage. But from the looks of it, I haven't wrecked anything to the point where you can find mistakes without close scrutiny. A good balance.