Caution: Knitting talk ahead

I finally bought the last of my birthday yarn yesterday. I got two cards with some money in them and decided to blow the whole wad on yarn. Like any of you were surprised by that. This may be my last big trip to my beloved local yarn store so I wanted to make sure that I would enjoy it and that meant ditching the kids. Luckily my husband often gets off early on Fridays, which oddly enough are when my trips to the local yarn store usually happen. Any whoo, I ended up buying the first yarn I touched. I have a system when going to a yarn store, I start at one side and slowly make my way around the room until I have felt all the yarn that catches my fancy. Only then do I make decisions about what to buy. This helps cut down on the crazy yarn fume purchases. I had a hard time putting this down the first time.

I just could not resist this sock yarn. The colors and softness won me over. It is made by Misti Alpaca and is mostly alpaca (go figure!) with some wool, silk and nylon to give it structure, shine and strength.


I wish my photography skills were better, because this yarn has amazing colors. The bits with several different shades of purple that are not showing up very well and are looking gray. There is a nice chatty lady that works at the store (I wish we were going to be here longer because I totally want to be her friend). She saw I was buying two skeins and commented that I would only need one skien for a pair of socks. I laughed and told her that I loved this yarn so much that I had to have two skeins. She said I was a woman after her own heart.

Karen received her socks last Saturday(like a true blogger she documented it) and it has taken me this long to even show you all more pictures of them. I am a bad knitting blogger. Oh well, at least my cute kids make up for the lack of finished knitting projects.

First up, the leg of the sock. Finding a pattern for this sock was rather tricky. I had wanted to try a short row heel, but trying something new when you are also trying to be perfect in a new technique can really work out well or it can blow up in your face. The short row heel blew up in my face and I ended up with massive holes in my heel. So back to the drawing board I went.

I was browsing on my favorite knitting website Ravelry and found that someone had written a pattern for this very yarn and very colorway. I was thrilled! And then I was crushed when I realized that I did not have the needles that the pattern called for (which were tricky to find so there was no real good excuse to hunt for them). So I went up a size and cut out four stitches from the pattern. To compensate for the different number of stitches I used an entirely different pattern with the same number of stitches for the bottom part of the sock.

With the leg I did do an new technique, cabling. I had been wanting to try cables out after seeing them done on a knitting show that the kids sometimes allow me to watch. They make a neat patten of Xs and Os in the leg of this sock. I had been so intimidated by cables and confident that my short rows would turn out perfect. Who knew that it would turn out the opposite of what I would have thought. I know that more cables are in my future.

Hugs and kisses!

I love this heel, it kind of looks Fair Isleish.

An overview of the whole sock.

It certainly was different knitting something for someone else who had active input in the project. Most of the time I knit something that pleases me and then I decide who is the most deserving to recieve the item. I also enjoyed knitting up a yarn that I might not have otherwise tried. Lorna's Laces has some amazing colorways and the yarn really knits up nicely. It was hard to give these up.