I Got Crabs at My LYS

It's not as fun as it sounds -- but still pretty fun.

Yesterday, I took a field trip out to Bluebonnet Yarn Shoppe in Cedar Park. I've had a link to this place in my sidebar ever since I heard about it, but hadn't made the trek out to visit. I'm glad I did. The staff (whose names, of course, I didn't get) were friendly and helpful, asking about what I liked to knit and pointing me towards interesting stuff in their store. I bought some cotton yarn for a place mat idea that I had (doesn't look that's gonna work out), and three skeins of sock yarn, one of which is being turned into this sock.

This yarn is called TOFUtsies and I got the color Footsteps (737). It's made of an unholy union of superwash wool (50%), soy fibers (25%), cotton (22.5%) and chitin (2.5%). For the curious, chitin is the stuff of which shellfish exoskeletons are composed. This is supposed to make them tough. This likely also makes this the first non-kosher yarn I've ever knitted with. I'm not sure how this chitin is collected. The yarn is made in China, though, so I'm hoping poisoned crab chow wasn't involved in the process. All that aside, the chitin is supposed to make this yarn extra tough.

That may be, but for all its toughness this stuff is surprisingly soft. That's one of the things that attracted me to it. I was also attracted to the colors, which are kind of Burberry-like and remind me of some tube-socks I had as a kid. These were totally white with one black and one tan stripe near the top -- very 1960s.

I also wanted to try and knit outside my box. I wanted to try some new fibers from the usual superwash. This is a little strange to knit with -- kind of floppy is the way I'd describe it -- but still nice. The ball band called for knitting this on size 2 needles, and I even tried that. But I decided I wouldn't look good in fishnet socks. Seriously, there were holes you could stick a pencil through. Who knits socks like that? So I stepped back into my box with one foot and switched to good old size 0s. Much better.

Also, over the last few days, I've resurrected my project of knitting little mini-mittens out of the scraps of yarn left over from previous sock projects. My plan was to do this as I went along, but you know how that goes. These had been backing up for quite a while. You may recognize, from top to bottom, the yarns used in the Gentleman's Fancy Sock, the recently completed Vinnland Socks, the Gentleman's Sock in Railway Stitch, and the Cedar Socks.