Sock it to me!

I made 7 pairs of socks yesterday!! I started off just with the idea of being somewhat productive – getting rid of a bunch of leftovers and filling in a few spots on my Christmas list.
Anyway, a few years ago, I had rashly dipped into my sock yarn stash to make ‘Two Left Feet’ and used up about 25g of yarn from several ‘sets’ of socks – just to clarify, sock yarn is usually 50g balls and you need two balls for a regular pair of socks. Some sock yarn is put up in 100g balls – very nice, makes sense to me because if you need 100g for a pair, that’s how it should come, but you can suffer a bit of sticker shock at the cash register. Let me explain –  my sock yarn stash came about from when I would travel and people would take me to their LYS and introduce me to the shop owner, I felt compelled to purchase something and it was an easy way out to just pick up 2 balls of sock yarn – let’s face it, I’m a machine knitter and I’d rather buy machine knitting yarns on cones, but you know, when in Rome…so, here I am in Cocoa Beach this one time and I picked up a couple of balls of ‘Tofutsie’ – without reading or checking the label of course, never mind a price tag, it just looked pretty. At the cash register, expecting this purchase to be less than $20,  when the clerk said, ‘that will be $40’, I almost choked, but to save face, I dug out the cash, thinking what the? When I got home, I realized they were 100g balls and had a list of specialty ingredients, so, no wonder it was so pricey. Socks? to heck with that - for that money, I needed something more!
I decided to see if I could make a summer sweater out of the 2 balls – yes, I could! See Knitwords No 49, ‘TuttiFrutti’.
Now, somewhere along the line, I ended up with 2 more ‘odd’ balls of Tofutsie, one in a pink/grey and the other grey/ivory/black. This is nice stuff and the grey\ivory\black made up beautifully – I made a shorter-cuff version like the summer socks (June 2011) I did last year ( I never did give them to Barbara) and figured I could get TWO PAIRS from one 100g ball with a little mix and match. The first pair has 20 rows of the 2X2 rib and the second pair has 40 rows of rib matching the pink/grey. I had my little postal weigh scale nearby and kept weighing the finished sock and the remaining ball to see how far and what size I could get out of my leftovers. By the end, 52g to 68g of the regular sock yarn, like ‘Regia Cotton’, ‘Schoeller and Stahl Socka Color’ or ‘Regia 4 Jacquard’ will make a pair of 7.5 to 9.5 ladies with 40 rows of cuff.
My circular sock pattern is on my website under FREEBIES – as a free pdf – I call them ‘Warmup Socks’ because I used to make a pair as a warm-up for me on the ribber before tackling a ribber project if I hadn’t done any ribber stuff for a while!

PS - If you put ‘socks’ into the SEARCH at the top of the page, it will bring up a lot of these references, plus others! Just for fun, I put ‘warm’ into the SEARCH – it was fun!!

PPS – I was going to continue and make 2 more pairs today, but my shoulders are killing me!! Back to baking…