Socks and samples

This pair of vanilla socks has been on the needles at work this summer, and they are finally done. The yarn is Berroco Sox and I picked it up when I was at Twisted in Portland earlier this year. These are for Boy 1, whose growing feet need more new socks than anyone else in the house. The design is my usual top-down with 64 CO, eye of partridge heel, and round toe. Look at those heels… you can’t even see the stitches! They are smooth but will wear well.

In other fiber news… One evening last week, Caitlin came over so we could practice spinning our new Dorset Down club fiber from Sheepspot. Remember this lovely stuff? We worked from the worksheet Sasha sent in order to get to know this fiber. I ended up spinning two samples. My first sample was spun exactly as I have been spinning my recent long draw yarns – singles on 14:1 and 2-ply on 16:1. Then I did another sample on a larger whorl (singles 10.5:1 and plied 12.5:1).Here is what my yarn looked like fresh off the wheel: It is a little overplied, but that’s okay. After a nice hot wash, it looked like this:

You can see that I got a fatter yarn when I went to a slower whorl (that’s the bluer yarn at the bottom), but I think the angle of twist is about the same in both samples. My next plan is to knit samples from both so decide how I’d like to spin the rest of the fiber.