New Yarn!

So Eldest Step-Daughter spent a couple nights here last week, crashing at our place at night while going through a training program in nearby Winston-Salem. This girl is busy. She works three jobs at the moment, and completed her masters earlier this year - and somehow she manages to have a social life.

She is, of course, well aware of the sock-knitting addiction. I was working on my Halloween wool socks one evening (now into the home stretch - i.e. the ribbing - woot!) when ESD hopefully says something to the effect of: "So can I commission a pair of handmade socks from you?"

It took me...oh, maybe ten whole seconds to snatch yarn catalogs from the stack on the coffee table and hand them to her. I told her I'd knit if she bought the yarn. I showed her some of the yarns from my stash as well as WIPs OTN (that's Works In Progress On The Needles, y'know) so she could get an idea of which brands were locally available and which ones have to be ordered. Given her training program schedule, a trip to the LYS (Local Yarn Shop) wasn't possible, so we decided to take an evening jaunt to the nearest A.C. Moore.

The poor girl had never been down the yarn aisles in a craft store!

Yeah, I know! Boggles the mind, doesn't it?

After going through a quick Intro to Yarny Stuff, she considered the sock yarns and then settled on a yarn I've never tried before: Moda Dea Vision (65% wool, 35% acrylic, medium worsted weight). At some point during the Intro to Yarny Stuff course, we decided I'd also knit a pair for her sister, Youngest Step-Daughter. YSD lives in the Los Angeles area, so I'm not sure how much use she'll get out of wool socks, but what the heck? Might as well knit for both of them.

Since A.C. Moore was running a nice sale on yarns, and since I'd recently sold some soap, I felt justified in splurging on a couple of skeins of this Vision yarn for myself. (That's generally how it works: one addition pays for another.) It's going to knit up into nice, thick socks, which will make my eternally cold feet happy. It's soft, but feels like it will wear pretty well. The only downside is that it requires hand washing. I think I can live with that.

My Evil Plan here is to introduce the girls to the addiction - er, I mean joys of wearing handmade socks and then teach them how to knit their own. (Cue evil laughter.)

I'll do the you-buy-I'll-knit thing once per person. After that, if you want more (and you will!), you gotta knit your own.

BTW, if anyone has knitted socks from Moda Dea Vision and would like to comment on it, please feel free. It feels comparable to Lion Brand's Wool-Ease, which does make a pair of decent socks, so I'm thinking it'll be pretty easy to work with. I know it'll be faster to knit than sock weight yarn. I'll be able to put away the Size 0 needles for a while and jump up to Size 5. Yay!

P.S. The yarns shown above are Color 2950 Forest on top, Color 2955 Glade on the left, and Color 2945 Sedona on the right.

P.P.S. The odd black squiggly thing behind the skein on the left is a chewed-on chicken feather (naturally shed, of course, and courtesy of my friend's chickens) Stormy the kitten wedged between the couch cushions for, I presume, safekeeping.