Thursday, June 21, 2007

Sock Yarns

I ordered some more yarn from Lazy Perry Ranch, and it came today. All I can say is wow.
Rainbow Sock Yarn. Seriously, the color? SO much more amazing than I could even imagine. Their picture did NOT do the yarn justice. You can see the listing here. Their picture, as you can see, doesn't do the yarn justice AT ALL.

Now, since I get an awful lot of sock yarn, I've been noticing there's a vast difference between thicknesses of brands. For example, Lion Brand Magic stripes is really thick, and Opal can be a little bit on the thick side as well. Koigu is a bit thick too, and KnitPicks sock yarns are at what I consider the "Perfect" thickness. Now, there are some sock yarns that are very thin. I don't know what base yarn the people on Etsy are using, but there seems to be this 2 ply sock yarn (I'm pretty sure it's all the same yarn) that is really loftily spun, so when you knit it into socks it stretches out quite a bit and becomes quite thin. Even just by ball winding. Now I thought it was just thin, but today when my yarn came from Lazy Perry Ranch, I realized that it's loftily spun, and not inherently thin.

Different sock yarns & their thickness
From left to right: Koigu PPPM, KnitPicks Sock Memories, SunnySide Ellen sock yarn (she has now switched to Louet Gems for her base yarn, so she is using the same base as koigu), Rainbow Sock from LPR after winding, Rainbow Sock from LPR pre-winding, KnitPicks Shimmer (lace weight).

Now, as you can see.. there are some discrepancies. Now, the thinner sock yarn- I knit these sock yarns from some from LPR- it's not so bad. It still makes decent socks, and for some people, it might even be better for them because the socks fit better in shoes. But a difference of 10 stitches/inch with the thinner to 8 stitches/inch with the thicker.. that's actually a big difference in knitting time and number of stitches, etc. So I'm kinda stuck. But we'll see. I'm going to wind the Rainbow Sock from LPR really loosely and see if that helps at all. having it in a ball wound on a ballwinder seems to make it stretch more because those are more tightly wound. So we'll see. But it certainly is curious.

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