G. Knerd

Last night, I found myself facing a new week without a single pair of socks on the needles.  Of course, I couldn’t let that happen, so I immediately brought out my sock yarn stash (it has its own box) and my trusty A Treasury of Knitting Patterns by Barbara Walker, and started the process.

First, I picked out the possible contenders for the pair of socks I had in my mind:

Then I narrowed it down further to the two I liked best at the time:

And then I decided that since I’ve already proven that I like socks made out of Tofutsies (also, since when does Amazon* carry yarn?), I didn’t want to try mixing a brand-new, experimental pattern with a yarn I’ve never tried, and the Tofutsies won:

(Also?  That’s some pretty sweet end-finding on that skein there.  See that?  I think it’s less than 6 feet/2 meters.)

Of course, after swatching the Frost Flowers pattern for a full repeat, all I knew was that Frost Flowers + socks was not going to happen, at least not this time:

It’s pretty, sure, but it’s alternately either not stretchy enough or way too stretchy – not sure how it manages to pull that off, but that’s how it is.

With only minutes before bedtime, and still no viable socks on the needles, I decided to go for a more simple, reliable yarn/pattern combo:

Self-patterning sock yarn (Deborah Norville Sock Yarn in the Thyme colorway, to be precise).  Pattern will be my own generic 72-stitch 2×2 rib sock (fits almost any width foot, although these – like almost all the socks I knit – are for me).

With only seconds left in the evening, I found an identical point in the skeins and cast on a couple rows.  In my haste, however, I may have overlooked several other identical points – this is the yarn I wound off before starting, from each of the skeins:

Notice any similarities?  Like maybe how I totally could have started right after the green instead of winding all the way through the speckled parts and the orange parts?

I’d say maybe I’d learned for next time, but we all know that’s not true – I bet I totally do the same thing next time too.

*I totally recommend buying your yarn/supplies from your Local Yarn Shop so you can support your local economy, but since I can’t link to every LYS near you (well, the JavaScript involved would not be fun to write…), Amazon seemed like a decent substitute.