An Impractical Love Affair

I will admit it: I love variegated yarns. There's something about seeing a skein of yarn blending together a symphony of disparate colours that just makes me reach for my wallet. I love to just look at it, sitting in the basket on my wall, like a work of art, or to take it down and stroke its softness, to wonder at the way the colours meld together and complement each other.


Of course, yarn isn't meant only for looking at; it's also meant for knitting (or crocheting or weaving or whatever your thing is.) The thing is: sometimes once you wind that skein into a ball and start knitting with it, you might begin to think that it's lost its charm. The yarn may start to stripe in some weird way, or to pool colours into big blobs, and you might look at it and wrinkle your nose at the way it's distracting from the stitch patterns. I mean, face it -- sometimes variegated yarns don't make the nicest end products.

With that in mind (and because of my self-imposed yarn diet) I've been plugging away, this year, at using up all of the variegated yarns I bought back when I was so enamored of them. I decided that perhaps semi-solids are more my thing, since they show off fancy patterns more, and don't look so (dare I say) gaudy when you wear the end product.

What I inadvertently discovered is that I really love variegated yarns. I realized that the joy of knitting a pair of socks is only partly that you get to wear them and show them off when they're done. There is also so much joy and pleasure in the quiet hours and hours (and hours) of meditatively knitting them, of seeing one colour parade after another along my needles, of making each little loop and watching how the change from magenta to coral makes this fantastic fade of rosy pink for just a moment in the middle. To see each of the colours I love slide past my finger and onto the needles never ceases to amaze me.

Some people wonder why sock knitters don't buy the $1 sport socks at department stores. Why would I want to deny myself hours and hours of pleasure, soaking in the saturated myriad of colours in a skein of sock yarn, not to mention the satisfaction and comfort of wearing custom-sized socks that I made myself, just to save a few bucks? Besides, what you might spend on going to see a film that will entertain you for a couple of hours, I will gladly spend on a skein of variegated sock yarn, that I get to enjoy for days or weeks as I knit it, and for months or years as I wear the gaudy stripey colour-blobby socks, afterward.

On Infidelity

Before knitting took over my life, I used to have a lot of hobbies -- I used to read a lot more, and you know, even leave the house from time to time. I also spent a lot of time and money on a lot of different crafts: I embroidered and cross-stitched and made Japanese temari balls and sewed a lot of clothes and tried out paper quilling... You name it, I tried it. One thing that I never really took to was crochet.

It's not that I have an inherent bias against crochet -- okay, yeah, I do. It's not stretchy like knitting, which I find is usually a detriment. There are occasions where the stability would be preferable (if you don't see what I mean, just try to knit a corset) but generally I like my projects to have a little give. That, and I've never really learned it beyond the very basics.

So what happened to me, lately? I seem to have caught a crochet bug this week.


I have been sitting on lots of leftover sock yarn (as I'm sure every sock knitter does) and trying to decide what to do with it. I looked at a lot of little projects and various sock blankets on Ravelry, but for some reason the one that really appealed to me was little crocheted hexagons. Maybe it's the hexagon thing: after all, I am only making thousands of them for a quilt -- what's a few hundred more?

I began with a few from some of the leftover orange and brown yarn from the Fisherman socks.


Then I pulled out some leftover Koigu from my Lindsay socks.

I think I like them. I will continue making them, anyway. They are such a quick little thing (maybe 5 minutes a piece?) that it's easy to squeeze one in, if I don't have time for a repeat or two of knitting.


Then I found a really cute pattern for square shell coasters. Since I was already crocheting the hexagons, why not try this on some leftover hemp yarn I had? It is a little sloppy because of my uneven tension (I finally figured out how to tension the yarn without getting finger cramps -- on the next-to-last round) but I think it's still pretty cute. It's a bit big for a coaster, maybe, at about 5ish inches across, but works well for my big mug of iced coffee, this afternoon. Maybe with a little practice, they will even out enough to use them as gifts for someone, sometime.

Or maybe I'll get distracted right away by some more lovely knitting.