Back to the socks, please.....

The more I roll into this year - the more I'm liking it already. I've been missing sock knitting quite a bit this last half of 2009 - too busy and frantic to stay faithful to one project - I've been bouncing all over the place casting on with wild abandon here - wishing for more hours in the day to work on 'insert name of project there' etc. etc. and never really getting to the 'ah, a finished piece' satisfaction. So, combining these two issues - I've worked out a deal with myself. I'm allowing myself to only be actively working on three projects at a time. No, that doesn't mean I'll be frogging all the other WIPs or anything - I just won't pretend to be working on them like I am now, follow me? LOL, me neither! The three projects I will pretend to be working on should go something like this:
1. Something I'm really jazzed about and can't/won't put down without pouting. This is the candy part - the bone that keeps the dog's tail wagging - or knitting - you get my point.
2. A WIP that I'm pulling off the dusty shelves and finishing so it can haunt me no more. You know, we've all got em - I'm just looking to have less of them come summer:)
3. Just socks. I just need sock knitting in some part of my day. Really, I do. It makes me feel comforted, safe, like I could roll up into a little ball and still be able to take that project with me. It's a cup of coffee and a comfy chair in a obscure corner of the bookstore on a Saturday afternoon whilst the kids are on their many important teen life errands for me. I just have to have it.

So, finally, after so many people have asked me to - I've started a sock yarn club to be a yarn lover's companion to my Happy Hooves Batt Club for spinner love. January was our first month and as I packaged up all the babies to ship them out this week - I was tickled to giggling like a silly girl that I'd been smart enough to factor myself into the tally and give myself a club shipment. Wanna see them? Well, they start with yarn but that's on the inside and we'll get there in a minute. I wanted this club to be a little different - a love and spoiling club for sock knitters. So, in addition to the skein of yarn - each month has some sort of 'treat' that I make up - the treat varying depending on the type of sock yarn used, etc. This month, I made these velvet embroidered wrist sock bags to go with the yarn. Oh, yeah, the yarn....

The hooves batt colorway this month was 'Vila' (spelled Veela in the Harry Potter series) and so is the yarn. All blue, all kinds of blue is sort of the theme here though I did sprinkle some accent colors in there which you can see if you look close enough or, in my case, wrap in around your head and yell happy songs because you love blue. I'm playing around with lots of techniques of dyeing with this club and trying to change and mix them for my own dyeing pleasure. I may have gotten a wee bit neurotic with this one (me, noooooo!LOL) because even though it was a kettle dye - which should mean it is very simple and basic - I managed to make it hard, time intensive, and put it into four different kettles to achieve an absolutely vivid palette of blue...with spices.

I'm thinking of making Cookie A's 'Calloway' pattern with these - the side-winding slant of the openwork in the pattern just sort of beg to be done in a water themed yarn...will there be beads? Oh no - I just thought of this problem (glances at the 'rules' at the top of the page). Okay, rules are made to be broken and I'm so obviously casting on this yarn as we speak very soon so a new WIP is born. Ooops. Now, which of the great 3 will it be? I mean, #2 is right out but which is it - 1 or 3? Urgh....this is why I don't make rules for or against myself....I'm too good at figuring out ways to get around them - or just perfectly okay with just abandoning them at the first chance of fun.