Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Mary joins a sock club

Omigosh! The mail!


And - ohhhh - my first shipment from Knitterly Things' Spring Sock Club. I am in love! Sorry Helena - I couldn't bear to part with this stuff.

Oh, would you look at that. Matching jelly bellies! Orange, grape, and banana! Mmmm. These must be fuel for ball-winding. But wait. What's the best way to wind yarn for socks? Should I roll it into one ball? The label gives needle sizes... and one of them is the size for which I have two sets:


Which means I can knit both socks, alternating between them, and have less risk of messing up my first-ever pair. And I did just read about how to wind a center-pull ball.*

Okay, I have no nostepinne, in spite of coveting the ones at A Piece of Vermont. Self-restraint is so unlike me. But I could use... my spindle!

La la la, this yarn is coming off the skein without any tangles at all. It's fantastic. But I'm going to have another few jelly bellies anyway.

H'mmmm. This is getting heavy now, and it's looking a lot more like cotton candy on a paper cone at the fair than it is a nice squat centre-pull ball.


My wrist hurts. And can you say "dog's breakfast"? Not that it helped when I dropped the spindle right at the end there.


Time for Plan B: winding all 438 yards into two balls with the same striping sequence. I won't be able to do all that in one session but if I stop in mid count I'll lose my place. Wait! I can use a paperclip to mark each 50 yard mark.


Ahhh, that's more like it. This yarn is awesome to wind... so soft and buttery and non-tangly. And the center pull thing really did work even though it was ugly.


I'm sure the 'one bigger than the other' thing is because I wound tighter the second time. And even if it isn't... I did want to have some left over for mitten trim, right?

Now for the swatch.

Omigosh. This is... unbelievable. The fabric is like 170% squishy soft. Amazing! I'm not even taking a picture of this one - I'm going to count the stitches very very quickly 31 sts = 4" and rip it out so I can get those socks moving!!


* note to self - next time, review the instructions and wind the skein to a ball before winding the centre-pull ball on the spindle, so it doesn't run six miles tall.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am now going to go away and die of jealousy. As my parting thought, I offer the fact that I find it easy to wind a centre-pull ball using the little ones' toy comb (into the teeth goes the first few inches of yarn, and the rest is easy-peasy: I may manage to problematize it into a tutorial, though ;-)

Kathleen Taylor said...

Beautiful yarn! I'll look and see if I can find the instructions for hand-winding a center pull ball without a nosty or center dowel. That's how I do it, when I have to wind by hand.