These socks, which I made for my sister Peg for Christmas, are the Mamluke Socks from Nancy Bush's excellent book Folk Socks. If you click it you will go to the Ravelry site for the book, and there you will be able to see what a dramatic difference yarn choice can make with this particular sock pattern. If you make it up in blue and white, for example, it will look quite a bit different than this version which is made up of five different colors of my hand dyed sock yarn. I like to use up odds and ends in these Fair Isle type projects which makes for a lot of variety and, in my case, requires me to knit socks two at a time so that they will match without any needless anxiety of the "do I have enough of this color" sort.
These are my Stained Glass Mitts, the pattern for which will be available as soon as I figure out how to use my color graphing software. I like to use the sock yarns for socks, obviously, but I also like them for gloves, mitts, and mittens because what you wear on your hands tends to get grubby and the sock yarns are washable and abrasion resistant because of the addition of a little bit of nylon to the mix. I also like to use the Hand Dyes for baby clothes. There are several of reasons for this. One, the superwash merino is smoother than non-superwash and this makes for a more baby skin friendly garment. Also the washability is a boon to mothers. And I also like the colors. Most babies, I find, seem to call for stronger, bolder colors than the traditional pastels. As you can see in the picture below, baby Nico is a take charge kind of guy with strong opinions of his own and a soft baby blue just wouldn't express his inner Nico-ness like these rich bold colors do. If you would like to acquire some of these hand dyed sock yarns to enliven your own stash hie yourself over to my Etsy site and take a look.
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