In Which the Pirate Spends the Rest of Her Yarn Budget.

I came home from the Maryland Sheep and Wool festival with $40 still in my pocket, but I knew that I wasn’t done shopping. I’d kept my eyes open on Saturday for the perfect sock yarn for Mom, and hadn’t found it – so I ordered the Cascade Heritage Paints from WEBS in the Isle of Skye colourway. It’s the perfect bluesy colours for her, with just enough variegation to be interesting but not enough to stripe or pool. Admittedly, I didn’t look very hard for her yarn at the festival, because I was kind of set on getting this brand. I’ve knit with it before and I trust it to be good. While I’m willing to take risks on my own socks, I’m hesitant to do so when I’m making a gift for someone else. Especially when that someone else is a little bit skeptical about hand-knit socks in the first place. (It’s sad that my LYS didn’t have the colourway I wanted in stock; it’s even sadder that it cost the same to order it from WEBS even with the shipping. Why is the yarn marked up $3.00 at the local store? I want to shop locally, but sometimes money matters.)

Then I went over to KnitPicks to check out the new colourways of their Felici sock yarn, and for the first time, one called out to me and *needed to be mine*. The name of the colourway is “Time Traveler”. I’ve been catching up on back episodes of Doctor Who (why I haven’t watched it before is a mystery to me) and I just had to have these socks. The description makes them even better:

Wear these brightly striped socks whether you are going to the office or traveling through time and space. Time Traveler is a colorful mix of purple, tan, red, gold, ivory, and gray stripes. While you can knit some really really long socks, this colorway will not create socks that are larger on the inside than they appear on the outside.

Even better than the description, my sister the Ninja has bought the same yarn and we’re going to have matching socks! She says the colours are perfect, and she should know, ’cause she’s working on one of those extra-long stripey scarves right now. We’ve decided to both knit Jaywalkers, because then the stripes will be sort of straight (like the scarf) and yet wibbly-wobbly at the same time. This is going to be awesome.

As long as I was already shopping at KnitPicks, I bought a set of sock blockers (in large, for my long feet). I’ve been wanting them for a while, primarily for taking pictures of finished socks. It’s not always easy to get good pictures of one’s own feet!

(a note: the two pictures of yarn are from the WEBS and KnitPicks sites, respectively.)