so....that sock yarn stash plan?

And because I have no self control over yarn buying when I've had an absolutely miserable couple of days (It's my consolatory, self-pity thing. I have an especially crap time and buy yarn to make myself feel better. Some people eat. Some people buy shoes. Me? I splurge on yarn I wouldn't normally have purchased.)...I've gone and bought 16 skeins of sock yarn (that's 8 pairs of socks!). I was going to buy only one expensive (to me) skein (for one pair of socks), but instead decided to spend a bit more than twice as much and get 8 pairs of socks worth of yarn. It was all on sale. >_>

So, yeah. I basically just negated my plan to use up a large portion of my sock yarn stash this year. The good thing with this recent purchase is I definitely plan on using some of it for gifts and some of it could even be used for things other than socks.

socks, socks, socks

I have decided that this year I'll be doing my own monthly sock club, so to speak.

I possess sock yarn stash of mountainous quantities. I am one of those "sock yarn is not stash enhancement" folks. That means I buy a lot (too much?) of sock yarn. And I love knitting socks; they are one of my favorite projects to do. They are the reason I wanted to learn to knit. But it seems that socks always get shuffled way back on the queue of Things to Knit. The only reason I can come up with is maybe I think "Oh, pish, I can knit socks anytime" and pass over them when I'm contemplating a new project. I keep a pair of simple socks in my bag, but I don't get many opportunities to knit anywhere but at home anymore. Having to keep track of a very busy two-year-old will do that!

I've been on a real sock kick lately because I got a new book last month - Knitting Socks With Handpainted Yarn, which is fabulous and inspired me to start knitting up some socks!

So, I decided to help quell the sock yarn "stash", I shall endeavor to knit one pair of socks per month this year. So far I've done these (January), these (February) and am working on these (sorry there's no photos of any of them up yet!).

These socks for my club will all be for me - socks for others (which I don't do a lot of), don't count. My other intention with doing this is to keep me motivated to knit socks so they don't fall by the wayside anymore.

yarn for sale

I have some hand-dyed sock yarn for sale on Etsy! Lots of different color combinations.

Check out my shop here: http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=58093

dyeing

I bought some bare sock yarn eons ago with the intention of dyeing it. I finally got around to it this week. Ohemgee it was so fun! There was a learning curve with this, but I'm happy with how it turned out for my first foray. In fact, I was so pleased, I bought more bare yarn and will dye it up when it arrives and I'm going to try my hand at selling it on Etsy. I'll post the info here when that's all set up (probably late next week). Worst case is that it doesn't sell and I've got some extra skeins of yarn to knit up and had some fun dyeing it!

But! Here are photos of my dyeing (I meant to photograph the whole process, but sort of forgot).

I keep the amount of chemicals in my house to a minimum, so buying a bunch of acid dyes didn't seem to fit into my philosophy on that. So, I chose to go the Kool Aid route. I also chose to use the microwave, because it seemed easiest.


I had to experiment with containers to find three that would fit in the microwave. Afterward, I remembered some smaller bowls I had and dontcha know they would've done the trick.

Part of the learning curve was the bleeding process. As you can see by the pink color, I actually ended up with a much larger chunk of that than I intended and it ended up nearly two different shades. However, I like the way it looks. There are also some white spots between colors where I anticipated more bleeding than their was.


And here are close-ups of the three colors I used. Strawberry:


Berry Blue:


And Lemon-Lime:


Here is the yarn twisted into a skein.



Finally, here is the yarn after I re-wound and skeined it to make it look prettier.