The First of 2015

After two weeks of sun and warmth, it was a bit of a shock to get back to winter. We had freezing rain Saturday morning and woke up today to more than 2 inches of snow. This is the time of year when my feet are almost always cold, so I'm happy to have a new pair of socks to keep them warm!

These are pretty much a plain vanilla sock. I cast on 70 stitches and did a 3x2 rib for the cuff; the rest is stockinette. I did an eye of partridge heel flap and carried the slip-stitch pattern through the heel turn for some added durability. For the first sock, I cut and reattached the yarn after the heel turn to get the stripes to be neat and tidy, but for the second sock I just went with the colors as they came because I was worried about running short of yarn (and that's also the reason I decided to make the socks fraternal rather than identical in the stripe pattern).

The yarn is Fibernymph Dye Works Bounce, an 80% merino/20% nylon fingering weight, in the colorway Electric Avenue; I bought this skein at Indie Knit & Spin back in November. Because the yarn is on the thin side and a two ply, I decided to go down to US 0/2.0 mm needles for a firmer fabric. Given the way I've been wearing through some of my sock soles, I thought it would be worth the extra effort. I was able to get a gauge of 9 stitches per inch, so the fabric is denser than my usual socks, but that did mean that these took more time than a plain vanilla pair usually takes me (I started them on December 12).

I'm quite happy with these, and it's a good thing, too, because I also bought a set of Lisa's Inversibles at the show. The Inversible sets come with two half-size skeins of sock yarn with two-color stripes. In one skein, color A has wide stripes and color B has thin stripes. In the other skein, color A has thin stripes and color B has thick stripes. I'm planning to knit plain vanilla socks again with my set, because why mess with the pretty striping?

I've been thinking some more about my goals and such for the year, and I think I've come up with my theme: Start with Stash. For this year, unless there is something very specific I need that I don't already have, I'm going to start planning for every project by looking for yarn in my stash first. I'm getting an itch to start a new sweater, and I know that I have at least three sweater lots in my stash already, so there will be no sweater yarn shopping. I especially want to make a concerted effort to use my handspun. There's a lot of sock yarn in there, not to mention a number of skeins that would be great for the Curls knitalong going on at my LYS currently. I am especially eager to work on knitting down the handspun stash (and spinning up a good amount of the fiber stash) because I got an e-mail this morning tell me that after more than two and a half years of waiting, I finally got a spot in the Southern Cross Fibre club. It's a monthly club, so with the Fat Cat Knits club, I may have up to 8 oz. of fiber coming to me in any given month. I'd really like to stay on top of it and not just add more insulation to the house. Maryland Sheep and Wool is coming up in less than four months, and while I'm planning on mainly enjoying the weekend and not buying so much this year, it will be interesting to see how much of a dent I can make in my stash by then.