Fun With Little Balls of Yarn

Warning to Sharon: This post contains a picture of a wool sock.

Several months ago a generous online friend from the Opal Chatters List sent me eleven skeins of Brown Sheep Nature Spun for CIC knitting. It's sport weight in various bright colors for the kids.

Knitting for CIC there are two main considerations, warmth and toughness. It's cold in Eastern European orphanages and the kids wear their socks without shoes. In my opinion, lightweight and/or delicate knitted items are a waste of time and energy. I've never used any yarn lighter than worsted weight for CIC socks.

This little sock was a successful experiment to test out knitting the sport weight wool with a strand of leftover sock yarn (Opal Bumblebee) carried along. It was knit on thirty stitches with size 5 (US) needles. The resulting fabric is dense, tough, and equivalent to a worsted weight sock. I'm very pleased with the result.

Using a quick kitchen scale calculation, it appears one skein of Nature Spun will make two pair of socks if the second pair is knit on 28 stitches. If I run a little short, contrasting toes are always acceptable.

I've been saving little, left over balls of sock yarn for more than five years. Once I start hauling them out of the bins I know I'll be amazed at the number.

It doesn't take much sock yarn for a toddler sized sock. The sock yarn ball in this picture is loosely wound and a little less than two inches in diameter. Its twin was enough to make the first sock.

I love knitting up the bright colors and seeing the interesting results. This is going to be fun. Most of the results are going to be more colorful than this first attempt.

Looks like I won't run out of CIC sock yarn for a while.