Friday, January 31, 2014

All the Muddy Colors

I wound up the yarn for the Emergency Work socks by hand. I don't normally do this, I have a very nice swift and ball winder at home and usually find an hour every few months to wind up several skeins of sock yarn in efforts to keep myself supplied. Unfortunately, the least used needles at the moment are my size 0, 2.0 mm needles and all of the ready-to-go yarn was either meant for size 1 (2.25mm) or size 1.5 (2.5mm) needles. The KPPPM skeins are only one sock each, so that wasn't too much of a time commitment in winding.

As is probably obvious, I err on the side of colorful for my sock yarn, which balances nicely against the fact that I'm knitting the same 1x1 ribbed socks ad infinitum. I really enjoy the blends that are the product of Tina at BMFA's brain--frequently 4 colors, and the 2-3 color blends that Baah! has been putting out. I was unusually entertained knitting up the last pair of socks for OAmy wondering how long it would be until another stretch of that dayglo purple would come up again.

Something I don't like, however, is when there doesn't seem method to the colors or that the dyer just tried to fling every color possible on a skein. The yarn looks, at best, muddy to me.  There was a (name forgotten) dyer that I saw regularly at festivals for a while who was vociferous in telling me that she had 15+ colors on her skeins. I found her yarn totally unappealing. The many other knitters who purchased her yarn would probably disagree with me, but it is the benefit of such a robust and diverse yarn supply that we can have all types.

(side a)


I'm having some of those "too many colors, not enough plan" feelings about the Emergency Work Socks. We won't focus the stress level I'm at today that I've knit enough to actually think about this (10 rows maybe? but that's 640 stitches, and I can develop a strong opinion in that amount of time). I don't intend to stop knitting the socks, I like Koigu's KPPPM-which I like generally-and while I'm bothered enough to spend several hundred words on it in a blog post, it's not ugly yarn or doing something I find so unreasonable as to stop knitting it. And I expect someone in the category of people-I-knit-socks-for will probably send me an email raising their hand and mentioning that they like the colors. It's just a colorway that strikes me as too abstract and mottled, so it probably won't be going into my sock drawer.

(side b)


Car guy topped off the brake fuel and I'm in a wait and see to find out if I have a leak or some other phenomenon. Glad I stopped in to see him though, it seems to be official that we're expecting several inches of snow tonight and emergency parking requirements over the next few days.

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