If you're me, you dive right in and start ANOTHER sock! Elann's Esprit cotton/elastic blend in the "licorice allsorts" colourway. I bought this stuff (and 5 other colourways, cough, cough) to make golf socks for my friend Sue - an avid golfer and curler and the best friend someone could ask for. Maybe I'll tell her I'm blogging one of these days! She loves black and pink together, so this seemed perfect. The nice thing about this yarn is fewer stitches and bigger needles, so faster progress. Usually I use a 2.25mm and 64 stitches for a sock. These are on 3mm and there are 52 stitches. Doesn't seem like much of a difference, but it is.
I've also got another pair of socks to show (really, I do knit other stuff!) - this was a pair I did using a different kind of dying experiment. I took the yarn and machine knit two "blanks" - simple rectangles of stockinette - takes about 5 minutes on the knitting machine for each, especially since gauge didin't matter. I then laid the rectagles out side by side in a rectangular pyrex dish and put the kool-aid on in strips - blue at the bottom, green in the middle and orange at the top. Cooked the dish to set the dye, let the blanks dry, then wound the yarn - unravelling the blanks and winding into balls. Started knitting at one end, watched the colours change and presto - tri colour socks. The yarn I used was Knitpicks Dye your own, by the way. I'm really happy how they turned out!
Now, before you think I am that exact with my dying to have the colours change at exactly the same spot - no way. There was some cutting of yarn to make sure the colours change at the same spot. I'm not really anal, but this made sense to me.
I've got three more skeins of the Dye Your Own, and a whole package of Wilton Cake Dyes. I'm picturing some spring-y socks in green, yellow, violet, and some more autumn-y ones - tan, blue, orange and yellow. Maybe something kind of Christmassy?
1 comment:
I love the 'Allsorts' socks. Your pal will love them. And yes, they make great socks for golf. You wear a subdued yet professional golf outfit, but you can get away with really interesting socks on the course.
Your dyed socks are so neat. I love them! Have you thought about doing some tiger-stripe colours in your dye plans?
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