I gave in. I blame Wendy. Here’s my Plurk page.

Any other knitsters on Plurk? Add me as a friend.

Someone please tell me how I missed this!? KnitPicks has released Bare Sock Yarn Dye Blanks.

If you’re at all familiar with Flat Feet sock yarn, you’ll get the concept right away. Two key differences though: the KnitPicks version is a blank for you to dye yourself, and it is double-stranded so you can make two identical socks from it.

The KnitPicks blank is a double-stranded flat length of knitted material that you can easily hand-dye a striped pattern using acid dyes. You can also do other effects such as this gradated technique which really appeals to me.

What’s even more fun… you can knit socks 2 at a time directly from the blank and the striping pattern will be identical on both socks! How brilliant is that? I love knitting socks two-at-a-time and this completely takes away the issue of having the two balls tangling around eachother.

I wonder how big of a mess I’d make with acid dyes in our apartment? I’ve never done any dyeing before, though it’s something that definitely interests me. I’m just hesitant to mess with dye in a place we’re renting. (Don’t want to kill our security deposit ya’know?) Yet, I’m really, really tempted.

Seriously, I just went to the KnitPicks site to order some lace blocking wires…

ETA: Alright, I caved. Looks like I better start shopping for all the other supplies (mask, gloves, squeeze-bottles, etc.) that I’m going to need for the dyeing process… ’cause I know I’m going to want to dye this up as soon as it arrives in the mail!

Thanks to accelerated/AP English classes in high school, I learned to hate reading.  Or more accurately, I hated the reading that was assigned to us.  On the rare occasions we got to choose a book to read, I usually liked my choice quite a lot.  (A Clockwork Orange was one of those few.)  I’ve only recently started learning to really enjoy reading again, and that’s because I came to the realization that reading doesn’t always have to teach you deep lessons on life, nor do you always have to pick books apart looking for themes and motifs and hidden meaning. I guess you could say I’ve rediscovered the idea of reading for just pure pleasure.

Just lately I’ve been devouring all the “knit-lit” that’s being published right now.  Combining my interest in knitting with a good story? — Heck yes!

The first bit of knit-lit that I read was The Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs.  I absolutely loved it, and it’s still probably my favorite in the genre.  I’ve heard there’s plans of making it into a movie too, which would be fantastic.

I’ve also been reading Debbie MacComber’s Blossom Street series.  I just picked up the third book, Back on Blossom Street.  I guess Debbie MacComber is “technically” a romance-writer.  I know I feel awkward (and a bit dirty) browsing for her books in the romance section of the bookstore.  (Not that there’s anything wrong with romance novels; it’s just that those Fabio-graced covers kind of squick me out!)  But her books are well worth it.  She’s really good at making you care about her characters.

Then there’s all the knit-lit books that fall into the mystery category.  Both Maggie Sefton and Mary Kruger have written knitting mysteries.  I’ve read Maggie Sefton’s Knit One, Kill Two and I’m almost finished with Needled to Death.  Her books qualify as a sort of guilty pleasure.  They’re rather repetitive (see Alison’s blog post) and maybe even a bit cheesy, but I can’t help wanting to read all of them.  I’ve heard that Mary Kruger’s knitting mysteries are better, so I picked up her book, Died in the Wool, as well. Come to find out, that’s her second book though, so I need to go back to the store and get the first one.

Finally, while not knitting-related, Kelley Petkun’s blog recently mentioned the Coffeehouse Mystery series.  Being that coffee-addiction and fiber-addiction are my two biggest vices, I decided this series of books was probably right up my alley as well.  I can’t wait to read the first book.

What’s on your summer reading list?

I find sock yarn incredibly stashable. I find it much, much more stashable than other yarns. I suppose it’s because you don’t have to buy a very large quantity of a particular yarn to stash for a pair of socks. Three to four hundred yards will do just fine, so you buy a skein here and a skein there. What with all the indie-dyers out there, there’s a virtual buffet of sock yarn to be had.  You could knit hundreds of pairs of socks and probably never use the same yarn twice.

My sock yarn stash, which is the largest part of my stash, lives in two wire cubes. The top-most cube contains all the unwound hanks, and the cube beneath it contains all the yarn I’ve already wound into center-pull balls. (I got a bit carried away when I first bought my swift and ball-winder, and didn’t know that it’s “bad” to wind your yarn too far in advance of using it.)

I decided to “unpack” those two wire cubes tonight to see what’s really in there…

(View the BIG version of this picture here.)

I started piling the yarn on my coffee table.  Then I realized it didn’t fit.  So it spilled over on to the couch too.  There’s enough yarn there to knit 50 pairs of socks.  Whew!  I guess I better get knitting!

My main goal for Summer of Socks ‘08 is to knit up all the yarn that’s already been wound.  That accounts for 13 pairs.  That’s do-able (… I think?).  I’m going to start looking for patterns to match up with each of those yarns.  Maybe if I get particularly ambitious, I’ll even print out all the patterns and make up ziploc project bags with the individual yarn/pattern combo in each bag.  Then I can just grab-n-go. 

Once all those wound balls of yarn are used up, that should empty out one of the two cubes.  I’m going to attempt to restrain myself to only having one cube full of sock-yarn-stash… not buy more till I knit some up and make room for it.  (Good intentions…)

I just really, really need to make room for my ever-growing roving stash.  So I guess that means I’m really not “de-stashing”.  I’m just “stash-shifting”.  Ah well.

The fiber color was called “Goblin Elbow Blue” and the pattern is the Lace Ribbon Scarf from Knitty, so hence I’m calling it my Goblin Lace Scarf.

It’s coming along a lot faster than I thought.  There’s only about 2 1/2 pattern repeats there, but it grows quickly.  Very gratifying.