Three things on Tuesday

Hello to you, I hope your Tuesday is going well!  I’m popping in with three things to tell you about, and I hope you’ll think they’re as exciting as I do! 🙂

 

❤️ It’s this boy’s birthday today, he’s a big 13 and we are so pleased that he is with us and he’s well.  As you can see, the celebrations are well underway and he said he’s intending to celebrate like this until dinner time when he might consider getting up to have a bite to eat.

We’re not always very good at remembering our pets’ birthdays, but it’s St George’s Day today so we do usually remember when the dog has done another lap around the sun.  He’s more interested in what’s in the biscuit tin or where the next muddy puddle is, but we like to give our thanks for him being here with us.

 

❤️  Ohh, remember last week I said I’d been knitting and knitting but I couldn’t show you because the yarn hadn’t been launched yet?  Well today’s the day – and you can find this brand new Yarnsmiths Merino Sock yarn on the Wool Warehouse website right now!

Wool Warehouse have a wide selection of yarn weights, varieties and colours in their Yarnsmiths range now, and I was just wondering when they’d be adding sock yarn to their stable when I got a phone call out of the blue to tell me all about it – and now I can tell you too!

I was delighted to be asked if I wanted a sneak peek at the yarn and you can bet I was very excited when the postie arrived with not one but FIVE balls of yarn for me to squish.  Ooh, there was plenty of squeaking going on when I opened the parcel, I can tell you!

Yarnsmiths Merino Sock is a superwash merino/nylon blend 4ply yarn and as I’m writing this, I can’t think of another commercial sock yarn where the whole range is a merino blend and it’s not either a hand-dyed yarn or an imported overseas brand, which makes it a really good addition to the choice of sock yarns that are available in the UK.  We sock knitters know that hand knitted socks are the best type of socks you can put on your feet, so the more choice we have in terms of yarns and colours the better!

There are … wait for it … 50 – yes, 50! – solid shades and 15 prints in the range.  That’s an awful lot of colours for a brand new yarn and so I was quite glad that the lovely peeps at Wool Warehouse chose for me because I would still be here choosing the colours if I had to do it myself!  Having said that, they do know that I like purple and I did put in a request for that rainbow-coloured yarn on the right so I was very pleased to see both printed colourways when they turned up in the parcel 🙂

I thought you might like to see the shade cards so here they are – and of course, sock yarn isn’t just for socks so there’s a whole world of projects right here!

Now, you know very well what I think of WYS Signature 4ply, so what do I think of this new yarn?

I think it’s lovely! 🙂

What I did I like about so much?  As much as I love Signature 4ply, I think that it’s good to have different yarns for different patterns and purposes, and I do love having a new yarn to try out!  I really enjoyed knitting with the Yarnsmiths Merino Sock, and I really appreciated how it knitted up given that I was on a knitting mission to try to shut out the worry about the dog.  Speedy stitches were the order of the day, and this yarn did not let me down.

It reminded me of hand-dyed yarn to knit with; it’s soft, it’s smooth, it slides beautifully around your needles and those socks that you can see in the photo above took me just over a weekend to finish.  I’d pretty much finished one sock in a day during the weekend when the dog was poorly and all I wanted to do was sit and knit.

It’s different to WYS as you might expect, being a merino blend as opposed to wool/Blue-faced Leicester which is used in WYS yarn, and the superwash process gives it a different feel as well (it makes it feel smoother in your hands if you like to knit with a yarn like that).  I’ve written about the superwash process for yarn here; it’s basically a chemical process that makes woolly yarn safe to go in a washing machine and it’s made a real difference to how we are able to wear hand knits.  Some people have an issue with it; I say that it has its purpose and we have enough choice for people to avoid it if they want to, but it has meant that some people who can’t wear wool through a wool or lanolin allergy, or have sensory issues can now wear hand knits – and in the case of socks, I think that’s a wonderful thing as life is always better when you can wear hand knitted socks!

Hattie didn’t mind me sitting and knitting all day – it took me a long time to get out of bed on that Saturday morning because we were both very comfy! 🤣

And of course, having tried out one of the prints, I couldn’t leave the other one in the ball to just guess what it looked like …

You’ll probably have noticed that the ball of yarn isn’t the usual ball shape.  I always pull my yarn from the centre of the ball and it worked as well with this yarn as with any other, although what I did find is that as the yarn got used up, the ball seemed to stretch longer and longer – it was very funny!  I know some people like to knit from the outside and there’s no reason why you can’t do that.  It’s still a ball of yarn, after all! 🙂

What I’ve also done is cast on for a patterned sock, just to see what the stitch definition is like if you wanted to knit something other than a plain sock …

I was very pleased with how it turned out; you can see the stitches very clearly and I think it’s going to look really lovely – but I need to find the time to get on with it now!

The pattern is Popped by Hunter Hammersen (Ravelry link) – I just fancied knitting someone else’s pattern for a change, although now that the dog is back to his old self and I’ve been able to tear myself away from the comfort of round-and-round knitting, I need to get on and finish the socks I started for not so small daughter’s Nepal fundraising, plus the two pairs of walking socks I’ve promised her for her Himalayan trek and another pair I want to knit for my cousin … these may take a while!

Anyway, back to those another day!

Today is New Socks Day and they’re very comfortable 🙂

I think this yarn is a lovely alternative to WYS Signature 4ply and I think it’s going to be really popular.  I like that it’s different so you don’t have to choose between two yarns that are very similar if, like me, you’re already a fan of WYS.  For those that want a yarn that is very soft right out of the ball, Yarnsmiths Merino Sock is a good choice, and I think it will suit those who don’t like the feel of anything woolly on their feet and have so far had to miss out on wearing hand knitted socks.  Being blended with nylon, it should wear well despite being soft, but you can see in the photo above that I’ve used heel stitch on the toes of my socks – I’ve got pokey toes so I never trust that any yarn is going to stand up to my toes finding their way through 🙂 – if you’re the same, you can use my Reinforcing heels, soles and toes tutorial to help.

The pattern I’ve used is my Basic 4ply Socks pattern, which you can use with the Sockalong tutorials if you’re new to socks, and if you need help with adding a contrast colour to your socks, you can find that in my Contrast cuff, heel and toe socks tutorial.

Would I use it again for my own socks?  Yes, definitely!  By the time I’ve finished the patterned pair, I’ll have three pairs of Yarnsmiths Merino Sock socks in my drawer and they fit in there very well 🙂

Would I recommend this yarn to a beginner?  Yes, I think it would be a good choice, although I’d always suggest going for a stripe or printed colour rather than a solid colour for a first pair as they knit up more quickly (don’t ask me how that is, it just is!).  There is a bit of a halo to the yarn (it’s got a fuzz to it) so there is the risk of it becoming matted if you unravel it too many times, but to be honest, if you’ve unravelled any yarn more than 10 times, you should probably think about cutting the yarn and casting on again at a new point so I don’t see that it should cause any problems, even if you’re new to socks.

And there you have it – I do hope you enjoy knitting the yarn as much as I have if you can’t resist the siren call of all those colours – and do let me know what you think!

 

❤️  Three things for Tuesday I said, and here’s the third … next Friday (3 May 2024) is the Winwick Mum Sockalong’s 9th birthday and I would love for you to be involved!

Every year, I host a giveaway on the blog and there’s a fun count up of pairs of the Basic 4ply Socks knitted since the previous year.  So far, we’re up to 18,288 pairs since the Sockalong began – it’s a fun count up because I’ll never really know the number of pairs and I’m OK with that; I just like to keep counting up because I hope that if someone is teetering on the edge of their first pair of socks, they’ll see that number and think that if all of those people could knit a pair then maybe they could to.  Yes, of course I know that it’s not one pair per person, but there’s still a fair number of people with their needles out in that total! 🙂

If you’d like to join in, the Sockalong birthday post will be out next Friday with all the info that you need, and you can leave your comment on the blog post and be entered into the giveaway if you’d like to.  Don’t worry if you’re only on your first pair, first pairs count too, and this is your heads up to dive into your sock drawer or count up your projects in your Project Super Socks notebook so that you’re ready!

 

Enjoy the rest of your week, I’ll catch up with you again soon! xx