Stripes and Marls and Colorblocks and Plans

After a spring of buying the most riotous colors I could find as I discovered and immediately fell in love with new indie dyers or revisited favorite ones from before, I ordered some less exuberant yarn recently. Seen here. 

Individually or collectively, there is nothing tedious about this yarn. It is important relevant yarn to my stash and to plans that I have for Fall 2020 (the Loopy Ewe and whatever Sheri and team have up their sleeves notwithstanding). But it's not the OHAI COLOR that I tend to gravitate towards when I'm yarn shopping as a coping mechanism. 

For therein lies the issue. I own quite a lot of OHAI COLOR yarn. Most of it doesn't go with the other skeins that are also exploding with color. This is no fault of the dyers, it's me being a magpie. But  I often buy a single skein of fingering weight yarn. Or maybe just one skein of DK in that interesting shade. And while hats are definitely high on the plans of things to make, along with fingerless gloves and other small items, I also want to have options for slightly larger items which might use stripes, colorblocks, or marling to extend/mute or further highlight the brighter skeins. 

And so I wandered over to Simply Socks Yarn Company -- a yarn store in Indiana that I've been meaning to visit for ages; put off further now by the pandemic unfortunately. They have their own in-house solid series, which appeared to be just what I needed, along with a skein or two of other favorites. 

From left to right -- the Silver and Brown are Simply Socks'. These 50 gram skeins will let me test out how the yarn feels, what other yarns it will and won't work with, and how I like it before I make a large commitment (yes, I know, that's rarely stopped me before).   The black skein in the middle is Winterfell on the Dragon Sock base from Dragonfly Fibers. It has a different base and twist and the blue/black will go with nearly everything -- so that should give me options. 

The skein on the far right is Miss Babs, a Yowza (DK weight) skein in Nebula.  My intentions for this are to split it (Miss Babs does *generous* yardage) and pair each half with a solid skein that I picked up earlier this spring.  If you've not been following along on other social media -- I'm on a big Honey Cowl kick still, working on #9 right now and I have several more I want to make and recipients in mind for some of them even.  

Unsurprisingly this is not taking the number of skeins in my stash downwards. Strange how buying yarn does that. There's been less knitting time than I'd hoped this summer as well-- there always is. But I"m nearly done with another big project that needed to be a surprise so as soon as that's been gifted, I'll be delighted to share... 

In the interim, know that while I"m trying to be brightly focused on Zoom meetings, I'm mentally rummaging through the stash (okay--I left the camera off so I could physically go rummage) to find which skeins work best with these solids to make beautiful new things.