So I opened the box from Mountain Colors and saw my beautiful un-skeined Crazyfoot yarn for the Gift Knits Snuggly Socks, and was thrilled. It still smelled a bit of mordant (the stuff used to set dye, in this case largely vinegar), so I didn't ball it right away. I let it breathe until this morning. Then, out came the yarn swift and ball winder.Well, I put the giant 1lb dye hank on the swift, and the swift promptly broke. Ooops! Ok, a little swift surgery later, I was back in business. Then, I cut the ties on the hank. Then, I started winding. Strangely, as the ball reached the size of a racquetball, there was a yarn end, and the swift kept spinning, no longer attached to the ball. I cursed, weighed the ball, and cursed again. Only 27g. It takes at least 45 of this yarn to make a man's sock. Nobody wants to knit a sock with multiple ends. I started winding again, thinking that was a fluke.
Not a fluke. It happened again. 3 more times! This is amazingly rare in the land of yarn. (Like maybe one in 500 dye hanks.) So I have 4 little mini balls of sock yarn, and then the rest of the balls for the club went very smoothly. 95g came out perfectly again and again.
Because Murphy's Luck follows me like an Eeyore cloud, I had only ordered exactly enough yarn to fulfill the kit orders, so I was one kit short. And they're supposed to go in the mail today. That's not the toughest part. No one in my area carries this particular yarn. They carry the brand, but not the exact yarn. Now what? Have a club member wait until the company can ship some from Montana? No. (This is where I would have used the cool Wonder Woman Jet.) Provide a different brand of yarn in a similar put-up? No. There is a reason these socks had to be Mountain Colors. The pattern was literally designed for their style of colorshifts in the wool.And then I remembered. I made the first two swatches for these socks in Mountain Colors' sister sock yarn, Bearfoot. The pattern works equally well in both. So I trotted out to my LYS and purchased one skein of Bearfoot so that all the club kits could get into the mail on time. As happens to me every time I'm in a yarn shop, I wanted every skein in the place, but I managed to stick to my plan and just buy the one skein. I don't know if I'll be able to get to the Post Office in time today, but I made a valiant effort.
Tomorrow, I buy Wonder Woman undies.
1 comment:
glad you worked it out! Though the four mini balls might have been fine for me - I plan to knit mine two at a time so I would only have had to piece together once in each sock. If Idon't knit them both at the same time the second one might never get done! HOpe to finish my second glove tonight - which probably GUARANTEES no more winter in Florida, not that we have had much of one anyway!
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