I really did. I tried to make la madre’s house socks with acrylic yarn. I even swatched the Red Heart soft yarn. A nice big swatch. But I just couldn’t do it. It’s so shiny and slippery and weird. So I packed it up and put it away with the rest of the cheap-o yarn that I hide around the house. (Well, okay, in a closet.) This disheartening setback totally interrupted my new sock-yarn-swatch project.
And then this came today:
Yay! My very first purchase from elann.com. Which was followed very promptly by my second order from elann.com when I realized I didn’t buy enough of the sonata. And at $1.98 how could I not make up the difference immediately? Anyway, two shades of sonata (sweaters for la madre), four shades of esprit (two solids, two prints) for socks.
I have to say, the esprit seems great. I’ve never knit with an elasticized yarn; it took me a couple of rows to figure out tension — I was way too tight at first — but once that was straightened out, it was smooth swatch sailing.
The yarn has great give and knit up nicely on #2 needles: 7 spi. Grumperina was right, though, the needles do need to be slippery (Addi turbo were fine), the elastic is very grabby. Should make for a nice pair of socks — glad I didn’t waste any more time with that Red Heart. It was not making me happy.
And since today was a day of much exciting mail (including the new Rebecca and a couple of the German back issues), I’ll share one of my first academic purchases of the coming school year:
Brand new! And I didn’t have to order it from Germany! Anyway, it’s a nice anthology of texts, which are, if not exactly hard, then challenging, to find. Nice to save on the shipping and photocopying.
