Lies on Knitting

The Show Us Your Socks Challenge

All of us sock knitters have -I imagine- the prettiest of sock drawers. Am I not right? Not the dull dark grey or blue dress socks, nor the never-as-white-as-when-you-bought-them sport socks, probably no "widows and orphans," just colourful handknits in all varieties.

This here is a crappy picture of my sock drawer.

I challenge you to show your socks too! Photograph it, put it on your blog and post a link in the comments. Or if you are blogless, e-mail me the picture and I'll put it up here. I will send out a skein of _really_ pretty sock yarn to the sockdrawer that I think deserves an addition.

Positive thinking

...or hardly thinking at all. Last Friday I caught a mean cold. The sort of mean cold that caused me to run out of church in the middle of a funeral service while coughing violently, the sort of flu that took away my voice and replaced it subsequently with absolutely nothing, a bad Donald Duck imitation or Amanda Lear. Worse than that, I seem to have five remaining braincells in working order... I stare at a page in my book for half an hour and I have no idea what I have read (or haven't I read?) and knitting seems impossible. I started a baby sun hat, but stranded on the third row: I don't seem to know how to count to seven.

Am I not lucky that this turned out to be the very best mindset for spinning? So I spun. A lot. I finished ALL -a pound- of the green BFL. And I plied it. And I carried it all around my neck for a day or two. No, that last fact was a lie... but I did consider it. It is Georgeous! I originally planned to knit it into a Clapotis, but Yep was quite persistant that this -almost unphotographable- collection of greens is a very manly colourset. And that his Gentleman Scarf is starting to bore him. Said gentleman scarf is made out of nothing less than Noro Silk Garden, people! And he likes my handspun better. Isn't he grand? But... if I knit him a scarf, I won't have enough yarn to make a Clapotis. What should I do?

While pondering the options, I started spinning the beautiful  handdyed roving my Magic Ball partner made for me. I'm aiming for sockyarn. 3ply, if possible.

Experiment

Not bothered by any knowledge of the process whatsoever, I decided to dye my first two hanspuns. I had 50 grams of a Merino-silk blend, that I had spun on the spindle. Half of it is two-ply, the other half I tried navaho-plying on. Besides that I had 100 grams of Blue Faced Leicester wool, spun and plied on the spinning wheel.

I bought a little packet of coldwater-dye at dreamline, with the intriguing name "Hematiet". The leaflet that came with it warned me this was no wool-dye, but if I insisted, if I really really wanted it,  I could try. Which I did. The word for this characteristic in Dutch is Eigenwijs.

Here you see the result. The Blue Faced Leicesterwool did not take on much colour, the silk in the Merino-Silk blend is the promised Hematiet. The little bit of Hampshire Down wool that I threw in the pot for testing came out unchanged, but with some murky coloured edgings. Hm. I am not discouraged or something, but I might leave this to those who really know their way around the dyepot.

I'm here

I am not swamped or beleaguered, but I am busy as a bee. I did spin:

I did knit:

And -apart from such trivial things as selling hearing aids, cooking meals and doing laundry- I worked on the  Everlasting Winter Coat. Do you see the neatness and tidyness of all these little stitches? This is the way a reversable-collar is made when you do it Really Well. This is also the way to keep a woman off the street. (and off the Internet) But eventually, it will be a great coat. It will.