Alpacafoot

Just before I went to visit this year's prizewinning fleece at the Fair, I spotted a booth selling alpaca yarns and kits and finished products, and kinda thought H'mmmm.  There was a little basket with some skeins of sock yarn and I thought double H'mmmm, remembering the alpaca Ady gave me in the summer, which I immediately wanted to turn into socks and didn't, after some discussion about whether alpaca can really hold up to that, even with 20% nylon added. (consensus: no.) 

The skeins in this basket were 70% alpaca and 30% nylon.  More H'mmmm.

As I wandered off toward fleece and other exciting distractions, I pondered the sock yarn in the basket, which had the following compelling feature:

the words 'light DK' on the label. 

also known as 'these socks will knit up so fast you'll think you've got lightning in your hands.'

But I had to think about it.  The colours I noticed first were a denim blue with rose, and a green with yellow.  I know it's a big draw when something looks great with jeans, but apart from a single denim skirt I don't actually wear jeans as they are insufficiently like pyjamas.  And I don't wear lollipop green or yellow.

By the time I came to my senses and went back to the booth:

horrors!

A gentleman was removing the now-empty basket, and another lucky knitter was paying for a large heap of sock yarn. 

I was just about to be crestfallen when I saw that three skeins remained, hanging on hooks above where the basket had been.  And two of them were guess what?

Apparently there were 100 skeins of sock yarn at the start of the Fair and I bought numbers 98 and 99.

(while buying them, I realized that I was buying yarn from the very same Meadowview Alpaca Farm where Ady bought the original yarn.  so now I'm thinking again of turning that into socks.  realizing it was the same shop and saying so also made me forget to take my credit card away with me, a fact I didn't discover till I got home and found a voice message to suggest I might want to come back and get it, which tells you how exciting the whole thing was.)

All that happened on Friday night and you can imagine how the rest of the weekend unfolded even though I was supposed to be making a Christmas present, once I established that some hardwearing DK yarn left over from earlier socks is an acceptable heel-and-toe colour match for the denim alpaca.

First the skeins turned into something knittable.

Then the knittables turned into cakes divided for socks.

And then, late Sunday afternoon - against my better judgment - one of the cakes turned into a cuff.

(but I'm still gonna try to finish the Christmas presents first.)