Fiber Monday - Sock drama

I've done a lot of reading this week which means I didn't spend as much time on fiber related things. I did, however, finish the socks I have been knitting for J.

To remind you, this are knit out of the yarn I spun from the first raw wool I ever processed. I also didn't measure well and ended up having to supplement with purchased yard. (The red is purchased.) Here is the second finished sock.

I'm pretty pleased with this one. Life would be grand if they both looked like this. But... 

As you can see the two socks don't match very well even if you don't pay attention to the colors of the heels and toes. The first sick I knit turned out to be a little too short in the foot and I just don't like the pattern I used. The second sock was the one where I combined two patterns together so I was happier with the gusset and toe.

Here, I'll show you. The brown toe is the second sock and the one I'm happy with. The first sock's toe is... odd and pointy. I don't care for it.

Also the instructions for the decreases were difficult to understand and the decrease stitched kind of swirl around to the top of the sock.

This is the same picture as above and shows the top of the instep of the sick. You can see how that line of decreases is just in a weird place. I much prefer the second toe structure.

And since it's too short as well, I'm going to frog it back, add an inch, and knit the toe the way I prefer. I'm also going to see if I can eek out enough gray yarn to knit the toe (to match the heel) because I also really like how the contrasting toe color looks. At the rate spring is coming, J. might still have a chance to wear them this season.

I will say I feel as though I have a much better sense of how socks are constructed now, so it wasn't all a waste.

[To frog a piece of knitting is to rip out stitches.. rip it, rip it, rip it sounds like ribbet, ribbet, ribbet.]

The other thing I did was to finish carding that gradient wool that I dyed last week. My initial plan was to make one skein of yarn with the gradient moving from light to dark. What I didn't take into account was the size of the bobbins on my spinning wheel. I love my wheel, but it does have fairly small bobbins. Spinning two hundred grams of fiber onto one of them just isn't possible. So, I'll be making four skeins of yarn, each of one color of the gradient.

I've finished the first one. You can also see the unspun fiber that I still need to spin.

Here is a closer picture of the finished skein. This is a much thicker yarn than what I showed you yesterday. Maybe a DK or sport weight? I didn't have a chance to do the wraps per inch to figure it out.

I am excited to see what the four finished skeins look like next to each other. And no, I don't have the slightest idea of what to make with them. They'll probably just sit in my yarn stash along with most of my other hand spun.