This past weekend was Thanksgiving in Canada. After cleaning and cooking and cleaning, I’m behind on everything after the holiday. It was a really good dinner, though, and everyone went home with some leftovers.

My completed knitting project today isn’t very exciting—it’s a new pair of socks for me. I like them, though, and given that I’m behind on everything, a new pair of socks suits me just fine. I knit these from stash yarn—Rowan Fine Art is discontinued. (That’s a Ravelry link because it’s not on the Rowan website anymore.) I liked this yarn a lot even though it was comparatively expensive when it was new. When it was discontinued, I stashed quite a lot of it. The colours are rich and it’s handpainted—they did the colour variations in a very regular manner, though, which means it makes patterns in the knitting like a variagated yarn.

Here are my new socks, knit in Lapwing:

They took 76g or about 3/4 of a skein.

This is the pattern I have memorized that varies slightly as I knit. I cast on 72 stitches on 2.5mm needles—I wrote up this pattern for my niece a while back and you can find it here. Since this yarn is thinner, I could have used 2.25mm or even 2.0mm needles.

When you look at the skein, there are four colours in the handpaint: a light almost-lime green, a medium green, a dark olive green, and a blue-green. It’s kind of interesting how they end up pairing off and making spirals of pooling. I like the efect in socks but would be less happy with this pooling in a sweater. You might remember that I made a shawl in Rowan Fine Art in a reddish-brown colourway called the Starling Wrap. You can see that there were four colours in that colourway and they paired off into repeating stripes, too. That’s something I’ll need to keep in mind as I use my stash of this yarn.

And here’s an interesting project with Rowan Fine Art Aran – the same yarn in a heavier weight – by DayanaKnits, using planned pooling. This project is possible because of the regularity of the colour repeat, and I find it fascinating. Have a scroll through Dayana’s projects while you’re on her blog. She’s a prolific and talented knitter.

I’m off to a knitting fair this weekend for the first time in years. I have a little list and am hoping to find some graduated dying by local knitters. It’ll be great to have the chance to smell the yarn fumes and squish the skeins again!