the dilemma of sock yarn
Dec. 23rd, 2005 03:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunrabThis entire post was meant to go in the ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
crochet community, which for some weird reason seems to have been deleted! So I'm storing it here until I find out what happened to crochet in the last 36 hours!
One of the tough things about crocheting is that many yarns are made specifically for knitting. Patterned sock yarn in particular.
First, ignoring the "knit" in the title, let me quote from Stephanie Pearl-McPhee's At Knit's End:
Isn't that a great thought for when your socks, or mittens, or wrist warmers, or whatever, don't turn out EXACTLY the same? Just tell people they're fraternal twins, not identical!
However, sock yarn holds a special dilemma for crocheters. For two reasons. One is that crocheting happens one stitch at a time, rather than a row at a time, and so the placement of dots of color don't work. The other is that crocheting uses up one-quarter to one-third more yarn than knitting for a given item, and this has two sub-results: one is that a ball of yarn which will knit up two mid-calf socks or high crew socks, will only crochet into two ankle-length socks, maybe a couple of inches of cuff. The second sub-result is that the striping pattern which is supposed to work out to almost exactly 4 or almost exactly 6 rows, a nice half-inch stripe of a particular pattern, when knitting socks from the most common patterns on common sock needles (size 1 or 2) instead winds up as stripes of 2-and-a-half rows, or other odd intervals, and not all stripes end in the same place, and the parts that are supposed to look like Fair Isle with evenly spaced motifs that are neatly patterned over a 4-row depth instead are irregular dots of color, nothing like evenly spaced. So generally, sock crocheters have to stick to yarns that are only self-striping, not the patterned ones, and if you want crew socks or calf socks instead of ankle socks, you have to buy 2 balls of yarn instead of one, and the stripes change color more frequently rather than nice wide stripes.
Life is still not fair to crocheters, is it? And Pearl-McPhee disses crochet in her book, too. Doesn't anyone give crochet an even break?
This whine has been brought to you courtesy of someone who is trying to finish too many holiday presents at once.
crochet community, which for some weird reason seems to have been deleted! So I'm storing it here until I find out what happened to crochet in the last 36 hours! One of the tough things about crocheting is that many yarns are made specifically for knitting. Patterned sock yarn in particular.
First, ignoring the "knit" in the title, let me quote from Stephanie Pearl-McPhee's At Knit's End:
I'm not obsessed, I'm just highly preoccupied.
-Anonymous
Self-patterning sock yarn is very, very neat. It is dyed to produce stripes of a pattern meant to resemble Fair Isle when you knit it up... For those inclined to be obsessive, it can lead to a dangerous fixation with making sure the two socks match. Many a fine knitter has gone down the twitchy path of trying to compensate for normal variations in the yarn in order to come up with two socks that are precisely the same. I have no proof, but I suspect that this may be a yarn manufacturer's idea of a joke.
I will accept that some sock yarns simply produce fraternal rather than identical twins.
Isn't that a great thought for when your socks, or mittens, or wrist warmers, or whatever, don't turn out EXACTLY the same? Just tell people they're fraternal twins, not identical!
However, sock yarn holds a special dilemma for crocheters. For two reasons. One is that crocheting happens one stitch at a time, rather than a row at a time, and so the placement of dots of color don't work. The other is that crocheting uses up one-quarter to one-third more yarn than knitting for a given item, and this has two sub-results: one is that a ball of yarn which will knit up two mid-calf socks or high crew socks, will only crochet into two ankle-length socks, maybe a couple of inches of cuff. The second sub-result is that the striping pattern which is supposed to work out to almost exactly 4 or almost exactly 6 rows, a nice half-inch stripe of a particular pattern, when knitting socks from the most common patterns on common sock needles (size 1 or 2) instead winds up as stripes of 2-and-a-half rows, or other odd intervals, and not all stripes end in the same place, and the parts that are supposed to look like Fair Isle with evenly spaced motifs that are neatly patterned over a 4-row depth instead are irregular dots of color, nothing like evenly spaced. So generally, sock crocheters have to stick to yarns that are only self-striping, not the patterned ones, and if you want crew socks or calf socks instead of ankle socks, you have to buy 2 balls of yarn instead of one, and the stripes change color more frequently rather than nice wide stripes.
Life is still not fair to crocheters, is it? And Pearl-McPhee disses crochet in her book, too. Doesn't anyone give crochet an even break?
This whine has been brought to you courtesy of someone who is trying to finish too many holiday presents at once.
