What It Is About Sock Yarn

So why does sock yarn hold me so tightly in its seductive little clutches? Mostly, I think, it's the color.

Not just the fact that, for the most part, sock yarn seems to sport brighter, more vivid colors. Or clearer colors. Or more colors per skein. Oh, you can find brightly colored yarn in worsted weight, too. But not as often, I think, because the sort of color-pooling that might be a little less than optimal in a small piece like a sock can be large-scale disaster in a sweater. And I would imagine for the smaller dyers it's easier to dye up a pot full of skeins of sock yarn and be assured that they'll all sell because hey, you only need one for a pair of socks! As opposed to dying up enough worsted for a couple of sweaters and then having someone order just a few skeins for a scarf and getting stuck with too little in the same dye lot to do a sweater....besides which, I am thinking (based on nothing more than speculation and bits of reading I've done on the Web) that one might very well put ten skeins of yarn into a dye pot and get out ten skeins that look significantly different one from another due to different rates of dye absorption or where they were in the dye-pot. So you might dye enough yarn for a sweater but not have it match enough to sell as a sweater's quantity...

So, here are all these sock yarns in gorgeous color combinations. Painted Desert ! Hibiscus! Moroccan! Heatwave! Charm! Exotique! Blue Flame! (Whew! I'm all worn out from drooling...I urge you to embiggen the pictures to truly appreciate the colors.)

But it isn't only the "oh, look...gorgeous turquoise and blue and orange!" as in the Madelienetosh Umoja yarn I'm using now. It's the little stitches where colors blend and mix unpredictably. The place in the darker blue where the dye fades to a deep periwinkle...the stitches between the orange and the turquoise where you get greens...always varying a bit from one appearance to the next. The places in the orange where it fades out to a peach or coral. The places between the deep blue and the orange where you get a beautiful, but unnameable, color...is that blorange? orue? octarine? (Lovers of Discworld will get that last one.)

Anyway, I think it's those little spots of blends and mixes that has me hooked and keeps me knitting socks. You always have the chance for a surprise.