Ariel Socks

Even though I put a great deal of effort into knitting up my whole variegated sock yarn stash, last year, there are still times when seeing a particularly beautiful skein makes me weak in the knees.  When I saw this yarn at the Loopy Ewe, a fuzzy warm BFL called Willow, from Huckleberry Knits, I noticed not only the amazing colours but that the colourway was named Little Mermaid.  How could I resist that?

I started out using a 2.25 mm birch circular, on the first sock, but somewhere around the heel of that sock, the needle tip broke off (ugh) so I transferred everything to a 2.25 mm steel circular.  Being as the needles were the same measurement, I never imagined that the two socks would turn out so different!  You can clearly see the different ways the colours stack on each foot, and somehow it even looks like there's a limey green in the right foot (there isn't.)  It turns out that my stitches are a wee bit snugger and tidier on a steel circular.  This may change everything.

I have another variegated sock yarn on the needles right now, and it's doing something even crazier, but that will be a topic for another day.

Snapdragon Socks

I wanted to celebrate the end of my Variegated Sock Yarn into Stockingette Socks project, so I saved a favourite of mine - sweetgeorgia's Snapdragon colourway in my coveted BFL sock yarn - for the final pair.

Despite what your eyes are telling you, this colourway features some fun fuchsia (not reddish) stripes on a super bright lime background.  In a fuzzy BFL sock yarn, they make some pretty warm, sturdy, and spectacular socks.

I did my basic sock, toe up with an afterthought heel, and tried the round decreases on the heel again.  This time I used the kitchener stitch to graft the last six stitches together, which I think makes a nicer close than just threading the loose end through and pulling tight.  I am growing to like the round heel, although for some reason it makes the instep tighter, I think, so I'm still working out the kinks in that.

Is it crazy that I've been wanting to order more variegated yarns to make socks?

June Gardens socks

Many years ago (nearly a decade already?) when I was a beginning knitter, there was an amazing yarn dyer in Edmonton named Virginia vanSanten.  I used to admire her yarns in the shops and dream of knitting with something so wonderful and beautiful.  I bought some of her yarn for a shawl once (Ravelry link) and loved every moment of knitting it.  Some time after that, I found out from one of the LYS owners that she had passed away.  It was a palpable thing, to know that such an amazing fiber artist was gone.  Suddenly the few skeins of her yarn that I had left seemed so precious.

These socks represent the only skein of her sock-weight yarn that I had in my stash.  I held onto it all these years, but finally decided that I would do it justice by knitting it, more than I would by keeping it in storage.  The colourway was called June Gardens, but I've always felt that it was more of an autumn colourway, with all that orange and red.  Perhaps her garden was full of marigolds and roses.

I did my usual toe-up sock recipe, a 68-stitch circumference on 2.25mm needles, but for the afterthought heel I did something a bit different: a star heel with decreases in the round, since I felt like that would reflect the shape of my heel more than the usual way (simply reversing toe shaping.)  If the center of the star heel doesn't feel weird when I wear them, I may do this for heels from now on.

Hopey Changey Socks

As part of my ongoing project to knit up all my variegated sock yarn into plain and simple stockingette socks, I found another skein that's been in my stash for five years or so.  I got this one in a sock yarn club way back then, and while I liked the colours, I assumed it would knit up as a crazy variegated blobby mess.  Imagine my delight when I started to knit it up and realized it was going to make stripes, instead!  All those years of wondering what to do with it and it worked out perfectly without any effort.  Lesson learned.

This yarn is Zen String Lotus Toes fingering, a thin little superwash merino, and the colourway is called Hope.

Only four more variegated skeins and this little project is finished.

Green Apple Fossoways

I mentioned previously that I'm starting to purposefully knit my way through the last of my variegated sock yarn stash.  I've decided to do it the easy way and just make the simplest stockingette socks from them all.  Not only will it be a quick and mindless batch of projects, but it's also an exercise in Letting Go of the Outcome.  My tendency is to be an über-planner and a bit of a perfectionist and I do like to challenge that tendency by just doing, sometimes, and learning that I can still fall in love with unpredictable results.

My latest simple sock project from the yarn stash was this pair of bright and happy green and yellow Koigu KPPPM socks.  The stunning beauty of a skein of handpainted KPPPM is definitely one of the hardest temptations for me to resist, though it is also a yarn for which it can be difficult to find an appropriate knitting design.  I've been hoarding this Koigu for the better part of a decade, so it's a nice feeling to finally use it.  The socks even ended up being pretty cute - the effect is mostly stripey, which is the most I could have hoped for.

p.s. George RR Martin fans will perhaps recognize the name of these socks - but only from the books, not from HBO!