Saturday, October 11, 2008

What Do You Smoke?

Okay, so we've been dyeing yarn for what, a month and a half? It was in the works long before that, but our first skein of yarn went up near the beginning of August. Well, over time and because we have solemnly sworn we will not hock our wares at our pal Jami's shop, we have formed our own little gathering afterward at a coffee shop 'round the corner. We're not the only ones who knit there - we've seen other groups gathered there before us, and we've heard tell of a group that outgrew the place and moved to the grocery store across the street.

At one of these gatherings, my dear friend Stef asked, and I quote:

"So, are you guys like drug dealers? You can't sample your own stuff?"

Okay, I think that's how she said it, but at any rate, you get the gist. And then I started thinking about why it is none of the three of us has jumped on knitting up our own sock yarn.

There have been many skeins in this process that we've all expressed a great deal of interest in. We've redyed several colorways that have sold because we liked them enough to want to knit socks with them. I carried around Sonrisa for days before I realized I should probably put it up on the site instead of hoarding it.

So why not? We could certainly benefit from having pictures of our finished yarn as socks or some such as "shop samples". All yarn stores do this sort of thing. I personally would love to wear some of the insanely bright things I've dyed. I don't care if you could see my feet from Jupiter - I love bright colors.

Again, I thought to myself in the shower, while doing dishes, and sitting there next to Stef and Em and Jess on Wednesday, why not?

Seriously? Well, actually it's not serious, it's rather silly.

I'm a 401(K)nit Stasher. I have more sock yarn than I need finished socks or than I could reasonably give away (finished socks). Okay, I'm not as well stashed as this nice lady, but give it time. If I am really jonesing to cast on another pair of socks, I can stash dive, or crawl through Ravelry and find something that inspires me. All of my stash makes me want to cast on - that's why I bought it - so often it's a matter of keeping myself from casting on like a crazy person.

Our sock yarn has a whole different feel to me. The creative process is in the dyeing so when a colorway finishes drying, that is a finished object to me. After that, it's up to someone else to take the baton and move the yarn through to the knit-up object phase. I wonder if it feels this way to yarn store owners? Or spinners? Or the folks herding and shearing the sheep?

Really, though, it's a matter of time until I succumb to some lovely skein or other. Our newest base yarn is just fantastic. I think it would compare to Lorna's Laces in plied texture and fineness, but smoother and tighter. It doesn't get all loopy like 100% merino as you dye and dry. When I have a chance, believe me, you'll see what I'm capable of. Vanilla socks, of course, but something fun color-wise. Clown vomit, maybe.

Just a couple more things...

Check out the widget on this sidebar. Usable only in Wordpress, but how totally cool anyway! Okay, so I'm considering switching to Wordpress and establishing my own domain name and this is just one more piece of motivation. If you're already powered by Wordpress, you can find the coding for the widget here. Brilliant.

Happy birthday, Em!

Sweet. A blogger who loves dictionaries. And the Harlot.

That's all. Carry on.

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