Friday, September 14, 2012

Trial and error: striped knitting edition

The other night I finished off a pair of socks - except for grafting the toes shut, naturally - half an hour short of bedtime and within five minutes I had dug out my bag of Stoddart romney/mohair yarn to cast on the next pair. 

(I am starting to get the message that my job right now is to burn through as much stash as simply and quickly as possible, so I'm trying not to fight it any more even though it does seem pretty crazy to be knitting sock after sock without so much as a neckwarmer to break up the routine a bit.)

Now, I was kind of excited about getting out a fresh colour because, as I mentioned in passing a few days ago, I recently found a bag of yarn that had gone missing, and which had in it some yarn I particularly wanted on the needles.  I keep seeing pictures of it in my Stash page at Ravelry, and in my photo folder on my computer, and then remembering how I pounced on it when I saw it on Silvia's booth table because I loved it so much.  I just couldn't find it in the real stash.

The trouble is, yarn can look very different in a skein than it does in a cake, and even once I found that bag I couldn't recognize the actual yarn.  It reminded me of a pumpkin when I saw it first - a lot of orange, with hits of green.

Was it this one?


Or this one?


I was pretty sure it was the more-orange option, so I cast on and got about this far by staying up too late (Bad Mary.)


But when I went back to it yesterday - my day off, which I'd set aside to graft sock toes - it just didn't look right to me.  I opened up the once-missing bag and wondered about that second colour and also the other colours in there.  Then I spotted remnants from my first-love yarn hiding behind some other cakes.


Don't they look great together?

I mean, striped?


Oh yeah.  That's what I had in mind.  Nothing too emphatic, just a little weight to ground out that orange.

Sometimes you just have to fuss a little with a project, even if it does mean putting toe-grafting off for yet another day.  Now my biggest problem is deciding whether the yarn reminds me more of carrots or pumpkins.  Or maybe a meadow of pinky-orange blooms?

With luck I'll figure that out over the weekend.  Maybe I'll even have a new set of toes I'm not grafting shut by the time I see you again Monday.  Have a great couple of days, and be good to yourself!

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