It’s Furious Balancing

I’ve finished The Blue Wollmeise Socks.  The depth and intensity of the Blue Curaçao colorway is nothing short of amazing to me.

Information junkie that I am, I did look up blue curaçao in Wikipedia and discovered that the liqueur — made from bitter oranges — is actually colorless.  Further link-clicking divulged that Curaçao is an island off the coast of Venezuela, whose name may have derived from  the Portuguese word for the state of becoming cured (curação).  Oranges.  Sailors.  Scurvy.  You get the picture.

Pattern:  Hermione’s Everyday Socks; the link is to the designer’s blog, for those of you not on Ravelry. ¹  I think this is a great pattern for just about any sock yarn:  semi-solids, wild handpaints, not-wild handpaints, self-striping.  The texture is subtle and the pattern is easy to memorize.

Yarn:   Wollmeise 100% Merino Superwash in the aforementioned Blue Curaçao colorway.  Wollmeise is, indeed, Everything and All That.  These socks have amazing drape, which makes them feel and look “dressier” than any of the other socks I’ve made.  One significant problem with the Wollmeise, though, is that it is a Cat Hair Magnet.  I was constantly using the lint roller on these socks while they were WIP’s.  I couldn’t set them down without them sucking up all the cat hair in a ten-foot radius.

Needles:  Kollage Square DPN’s, US size 1 and 0.  I started with the 1′s, then switched to the 0′s when about 75-80% of the leg was done.

Size:  Women’s Small.  My shoe size is 6½, so I can get away with making a pair of socks AND a scarf out of one skein of Wollmeise.  I am shamelessly smug about this.

Mods:  Cast on 60 stitches instead of 64.  I didn’t do the garter-stitch edging for the heel flap which, in retrospect, was not the best choice.  There is one spot on one of the heels where my half-assed picking up of stitches sticks out like a sore thumb.  My half-assed-ness would be better hidden by the garter stitch.  I console myself with the idea that (a) I could have still had the half-assed-ness even with the garter stitch border and (b) no one will see it while I’m wearing the socks.

I started the next pair of socks almost immediately, using this yarn:

Those colors will help me cope with the awful sunlight and heat.  Three more months…  Gack.  Time to turn up the air conditioning.

1. Why the heck aren’t you on Ravelry by now?!? [↩]

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 12th, 2010 at 7:52 am and is filed under Knitting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.