Growing the Stash

Just got another order from Knit Picks two days ago!  Leigh and I went together to get some solid colors for future knit-a-longs, specifically for our "Knit Sock Love" KAL socks.  Cookie A's patterns often have a lot of pattern/texture/cables/etc which can be obscured by busy yarn, so solids, semi-solids, and tonals work best.

Here's the order (I'll make the photo large so you can see all of the yummy yarn goodness better):

Top Row:  Dove Heather, Gypsy

Middle:  Rouge, Fedora (brown), and Majestic

Bottom:  Dusk, Pumpkin, and Bare/Natural

The purple Majestic and red Gypsy are Leigh's - the rest is mine.  Mine mine mine!  All mine!  And I have plans for each and every skein.

Fedora will go with Springtime (green tonal from my stash) for Norwegian Rose socks.

Bare/Natural will go with Make Believe (handpainted yarn from stash) for Fair Isle Socks from Wendy Johnson.  (The Norwegian Rose are also one of her patterns.)

Dusk is for the August KSL KAL - the pattern is Twisted Flower by Cookie A.

Rouge is for Cusp and is similar to the color actually used for the photo for the pattern in her book.

Dove Heather is for Stalagmite.  It was originally going to work for the Solid Socks monthly KAL for black/white/gray socks, but all of the Cookie A. patterns for 2012 shifted out a month since the moderators decided not to do a cast-on for December.  December is a busy month but also the socks for October are knee socks so people might be behind for Nov/Dec.  But I thought this would look great in the light gray, so I'm not switching my yarn choice.  In any case, here's what Stalagmite looks like.

And finally, the Pumpkin sock yarn will work great for Sake socks next July (yes, July 2012) and the SS color that month is orange.  Perfecto!  Heeeere's Sake!

There are, of course, other socks that I'm going to knit in the next year that aren't mentioned because that yarn was already in my stash.  I think I'm pretty much set for yarn for socks for quite a while.  Not that I won't buy anymore, but at least I know that I have enough right now that I won't get cold and die.  :)

I still haven't blogged about my quickie socks so I'll do that in the next couple of days.  In the meantime, I'm working on my Stricken socks and have gotten to the trickiest, most pain-in-the-butt part of the pattern.  The heel flap is worked back and forth with a chart which means every other row is read left to right instead of right to left and every stitch & cable have to be reversed.  So I've got cables where I purl through the back loop, regular knits instead of purls, more ptbl instead of ktbl, and did I mention all of the cable stitches are flipped and the directions are reversed.  I feel like I'm reading the pattern inside out or something.  I already had to tink back on the first wrong side heel row.  If you've ever tinked back cables and back loop stitches, you'll know what a royal pain it is.  Fortunately it was just on the first WS row.  Unfortunately that's the only WS row I've done so far.  *whimper*

Wish me luck!