Goodbye more sock yarn!

IMPORTANT Housekeeping Note

I plan to switch from Movable Type to WordPress in the next month or two. Once I do that my old feed won’t work any more. I’ve setup a feedburner feed that will transfer when I make the move. You can point your RSS reader to the blog right now (the feed link has been updated), and if you need the link itself here it is.

This year has evolved to be the year of using sock yarn stash. One of my goals for this year was to end the year with less sock yarn than I started with. To date I’ve used up enough for 6 pairs of socks and have only bought for 2 (and those 2 have already been used).
I credit this to 2 ravelry groups – Sock Knitters Anonymous and Stash Knit Down. The rules in the monthly SKA challenges have given me enough choices each month to feel both not contstrained and not paralyzed with too many choices. Stash Knit Down is great for the KALs and monthly achievement sharing. They’ve been just what I needed to focus but still be creative.
And with all that I have 2 more FOs to share with you today.
Multnomah
Multnomah mosaic for blog post
Multnomah was one of those knits that just took hold and flew. I love everything about this project – the garter stitch, the feather and fan, the yarn and dye job, the shape (a wider, narrower triangle that works so well bandit-style), the ability to use up almost all of my yarn.
Pattern: Multnomah by Kate Flagg
Yarn: Dragonfly Djinni Sock Yarn in Reluctant Dragon
Mods: Worked 11 repeats of the feather and fan pattern so I could use up all my yarn. The hank had very generous yardage – almost 500 yards.
This is a great size and shape for me and I expect to use it a lot once fall comes around (even though I can’t imagine wanting to wrap myself in warm layers of wool after the week we’ve had here in the northeast).
Citron
Citron
I bought the yarn for Citron to use in a class I taught last year. The shawl required 2 hanks of sock yarn and since I never buy 2 hanks of the same yarn I had to get something. It turned out I didn’t enjoy knitting the shawl so I never finished it (got about halfway through the first hank though so that was a lot of frogging).
Citron seemed like a good match – I wanted to knit it and I could add repeats to use up most of my yarn. In the end, I was able to do 7 repeats but had to cut the ruffle edge a few rows short.
Citron mosaic
Pattern: Citron by Hilary Smith Callis
Yarn: Woolbearers Kraemer Sterling Silver Sock Yarn in Colonial Blue, 2 hanks
Mods: 2 additional repeats, (unintentionally) a slightly shorter ruffle because I was running out of yarn
Thoughts: I like the shawl aesthetically – the color, the yarn, the ruching and the drape are all great. After taking it off the needles and blocking it though – it’s *really* big. I don’t wear shawls as shawls – I use them as scarves and wear them bandit-style. I’m not sure if this one will really do that of if it will be too bulky.
If it doesn’t work out as a shawl-scarf I will definitely use it when knitting or watching TV during the cold months in the house. It will get use either way – just possibly not the way I had intended.
Future Shawls
After Citron’s shaping education I’ve been thinking about more Baktus-style shawls. The shape is *perfect* for wearing under a jacket or a coat and patterns have been popping up like crazy using the side-to-side shallow shaping. Coquille in the new knitty (great for variegated or handdyed), Saroyan (knit in worsted but could easily be adjusted for sock yarn), and Galathea (shown in lace weight but could work for sock yarn too) are just three in this shape that I have in my rav faves.
To avoid burnout I’m taking a few weeks break from shawl knitting – working on my latest SKA sock and my Vesper. And of course I’m dreaming about my next big WIP – what to do for Rhinebeck. More on that to come…

2 thoughts on “Goodbye more sock yarn!

  1. Aren’t Kate’s yarns lovely? Your finished Multinomoh has inspired me to pull my unfinished one out of the UFO pile and take it with me to work on today at the LYS.
    The colors of your Citron are stunning. I love that shade of blue. like to have a few shawl/wraps that are a bit on the big side. I walk to work and to the post office daily. I do not like to wear hats though so I will wrap the shawl up over my ears in the winter.

  2. I have a yarn-unrelated question: once you switch to WP, how will the links to old entries work? Do their URLs remain the same, or…? I’ve felt the need to upgrade from MT for a while now, but it’s daunting to think about how integrated into the MT interface my current blog is…

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