Sock Lobster Love!

The Crazy Conservative Socks are done. In fact, they have been finished for some time, but I have fallen out of the habit of blogging regularly.

No apology from me, though, because I have taken the pledge. The Blogging Without Obligation pledge. Personally, I think you should thank me for not blogging daily, because you would all be bored senseless, but whatever.

To the knitting!



To those of you who have been knitting socks for even a short time, this should be a pretty familiar sight. No doubt those of you who don't knit socks have seen similar sights, but in this case, this is entirely fingering-weight yarn left over from socks I have knit. Which means I have tiny balls of yarn in other weights also sitting around somewhere, just not in this picture. Some of this yarn was just too nice to let sit around this way. It deserved a better fate. (Some didn't, and it is still sitting around.)

More importantly, I had sufficient quantities of some of it to actually justify doing something with it. I picked just these:



Not only are there more than just scraps here, but I love most of these yarns.

The pink is leftover Dream in Color Smooshy, which I won in a contest and used for my Flow Motion socks.

The purple is hand-dyed by J.L. Yarnworks, and I love it! I used it in my purple monkeys, which I loved so much and yet gave away. This was traumatic, and I asked Ms. Yarnworks to dye me some more purple sock yarn, which she very obligingly did. I have been meaning to post a picture of that new yarn, but the light was so bad for a while there, and I haven't taken a picture of it yet. I love the new yarn too, and I might have to make more Monkeys to commemorate the others.

The blue yarn on the left is from my Waving Lace socks, and the blue yarn on the right is from my Stanfield 196 socks. (BTW -- I now own Leslie Stanfield's excellent stitch pattern book, and it is beyond me why she is referred to in so many places as "Stansfield", with two letter S's, when her name has only one S. It could be because her book is out of print, but that's not much of an excuse, really. But I digress.)

I ended up not using the Waving Lace yarn at all, so I still have that. The only commercial yarn in the lot is a solid, and had to stand in for some of the Purple Monkey yarn. I wish I had had more of the Purple Monkey sock yarn left, but alas I didn't.



You can see here that the purple on the legs of the socks doesn't match. Ah, well. Bonus -- you can see that the Purple Monkeys sock yarn is very gorgeous. The scanner can't get its color right at all.

They look too big in the photos, don't they? But now, after a trip through the wash, they fit ju-u-u-ust right.



They are very Harlequin-esque. One might even say, ugly. But a pair is somehow so ugly they're cute.

These socks do fit well. The areas of the picked-up stitches between areas of color feel a bit odd when I first put the socks on, but after that they are not noticeable.

For those of you who might be interested, here are the yarn amounts used (I tried to make a pretty table, but I don't know how to get blogger to display it correctly):

Pink Smooshy: starting weight 1.9 oz.; Sock One used 0.6 oz.; Sock Two used 0.6 oz.; total used, 1.2 oz.

Purple Monkey: starting weight 1.0 oz.; Sock One used 0.3 oz.; Sock Two used 0.6 oz.; total used, 0.9 oz.

Solid purple yarn: starting weight 1.0 oz.; Sock One used 0.2 oz.; total used, 0.2 oz.

Stanfield 196: starting weight 1.1 oz.; Sock One used 0.2 oz.; Sock Two used 0.1 oz.; total used, 0.3 oz.

Total for each sock: 1.3 ounces.

These amounts were all weighed on our handy-dandy electronic postal scale. The socks are women's size 8, knit on a KnitPicks 2.5mm 32" circ., magic-loop style, as always.



And here are the leftovers (of the leftovers). The blue yarn there (from the Waving Lace socks) wasn't used, but the other blue yarn was pretty much used up.

Modifications: the original pattern is a men's, I re-sized for my feet. The on-line picture is too dark and seems to show the colors arranged as I have them, but I now realize that the pattern is written with the colors arranged differently.

Would I make these again? Actually, I might. The design is interesting to knit, although I have some quarrels with the way the pattern is written -- it could be a lot clearer. But now I know how it goes, so that's no longer a problem. It's a pretty good way to use up leftovers of solid or semi-solid yarns that go together, and turn scraps into socks -- what's not to like about that? There are a lot of ends to weave in, but that wouldn't be enough to stop me. It can also be easily adjusted for different sizes. Now that I know more precisely how much yarn of the various colors I would need, I just might be able to use this again to turn scraps into socks.