Handspun socks

Once upon a time there was a braid of Superwash Merino/Bamboo/Nylon blend, especially for sock spinners from Ewe Give Me The Knits, who surely wins a prize for business name.  I spent many an hour, some more patient than others, turning it into 100g of handspun three ply (for those who knit but do not spin, I mean there are three strands going into the final yarn, not that it is finer than ‘fingering’ or ‘4 ply’), high-twist yarn.  There is a previous post about the spinning part.  Fibre selection and spinning strategy were both focused on producing sock yarn.

In my experience, if I want to produce a fine yarn, especially one with three plies, I have to make sure the singles are really fine.  In this case I went with ‘as fine as possible’, pretty much.  The comments at Guild touched on ‘frog hair’, though needless to say there are some serious fine spinners in the Guild, and I’m not one of them.  Here is my yarn beside some 4 ply (fingering) sock yarns I’ve knit into socks using 3 mm needles.

Closer… I think my yarn is on the thin side compared to the 4 ply (fingering) yarn I usually would use to knit socks, so I went down a needle size to 2.75 mm (oooh—) and cast on!

With yarn and needles as fine as any I’ve ever used, this took a little while.  Quite a while.  But in the end… these went off to warm the toes of my fairy godson–and yesterday I sighted them peeking out between his shoes and his jeans as we all pedalled into town to see a fabulous exhibition and talk about political printmaking in South Australia in the 1970s and 1980s. I feel very deeply blessed to have precious friends who appreciate handmade things so fulsomely.