Happy Saturday!

I don’t know  how it is where you are, but right now in Houston it is sort of overcast/gray, 89ºF but feels like 102ºF, with a good chance of severe thunderstorms for the next several days.  ‘Tis the season, as they say.

Anyway, as promised,  I did dye up ten long-long hanks of Merino/Nylon sock yarn that came to me in superlong hanks.  Here’s a picture of the yarns I was dealing with.  The little one is my regular sized hank.  On the skein-winder it is 2 yards around (72 inches), or about 36-inches long when pulled out into a long loop.  The long skinny loop is the Merino/Nylon hanks.  It came to me with only a few binding ties, so I had to first add 8 or a dozen more binding ties in order to minimize tangling.  Even with that, these thin wispy hanks had little strands pull here and there through the process of pre-dye soaking (they were in individual mesh bags for this), then dyeing, and then the post-dye wash-and-rinse, which is always done in mesh bags.

So, that’s what I was working with, and I did my best with it.   As part of my preparation, I was aiming to dye two-tone half-and-half skeins that would end up as self-striping sock yarns with fairly equal sized stripes.  I marked the half-way point with a nylon cord.  I discovered during the post-dye bursting of pouches that the nylon marking cord had slipped on some of them; thus, some of them will knit up with one color with wider stripes than the other.  Also, on a couple of them I tried doing them with one long solid section, and one multi-colored section so when they are knit up they will have a more solid stripe and a multi-color stripe.

Ahhh, well….   I’ve been at this for nearly 16 years, but this is the first time I’ve tried doing this type of hank.  Always a learning experience, right?   I did learn a few things as I did these, of course.  The main thing I learned is that I won’t soon try a project not suited to my available workspace (and patience).

The other issue is that I wasn’t sure how to even show these fairly, since some of them don’t have equal sized sections.  If you can think of a better way to display these for preview purposes, I’d love to hear it.  They will, of course, be reskeined and labeled for the Blog Reader Specials page and will look like all my other yarns in the final put-up.

As for the Phydlbitz Sock (75/25 Superwash Corriedale/Nylon) on the first rack, I had pulled a random palette of colors to work with.  As I did the first few, in my head I heard, “Daddy, Teal Me a Story.”   So I put the teal away and used other colors for the remaining 8 or 10 skeins.   Twinset #441-442 is a Teal Fade, and teal also figures into Twinset #443-444 (dyed as a request to attempt repeating #436 from last week.  Twinset #447-448 is a two-tone turquoise and navy.  Several Twinsets have a gray undertone or third section, so I’ve given all the skeins a half-twist at the bottom rain for preview purposes.  I didn’t use any green on the Phydlbitz Sock — any green is a blending of blues, yellows, and gray.

Phydlbitz Sock and the Self-Striping Sock will all be normally priced at $27.50 when they go to the Blog Reader Specials page, but for Saturday and Sunday, you may claim any of this new collection (#437 – 458) for $25.50 each at preview pricing.

To claim the ones you want, just send me an email with your numbered requests and I will mark it off on the Available Yarn tally chart below.

Because of the wispy nature of these long-long hanks, it will take an extra day or so to turn these into the more manageable reskeined hanks that I normally send out.  So I will say that all of these should be ready to ship on or about Wednesday.

Available Yarns
Rack 1 – 437, 438, 439, 440, 441, 442, 443, 444, 445, 446, 447, 448
Rack 2 – 449, 450, 451, 452, 453, 454, 455, 456, 457, 458

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