Sock yarn patterning

Now I'm a little more in the land of the living, I just wanted to show you the last of the yarn I ordered. It arrived with my niddy noddy just as the snow descended, and my photos couldn't get away from the white 'glare' from outside. But, they are okay for a little taster! This is the Trekking hand art range from Zitron. In the online shop picture it looked much redder so I wasn't expecting orangey/brown tones - but hey! (It does emphasise the importance of getting the colour right for my own yarns though.)

What I found the most interesting was the actual length of the hank. It measures in the round about 1.25 metres all told and you can clearly see how the colour has been distributed along the length. I like how some sections of colour are diagonal or striped or don't cover every thread - interesting. It will be even more interesting to see how it knits up. I read somewhere on a sock pattern that if you have short stretches of colour, it stops the pattern pooling or 'flashing' - thinking the sundae socks and zigzags!

Out of curiosity, I also unwound a bit of the green trekking yarn to find the length of the repeat in that. About an hour later, a pool of yarn on the floor and with a full page of measurements, I realised the repeat is just over 47 metres long. And there I was worried about 12 metres. Helps to put things in perspective! So, okay, I can't compete with a machine produced yarn but I can have a play and the longer the length, the more variety you can get in the colour variations. But I'm not busting a gut to get 47 metres :-)

So, now I've got all this yarn, I want to get knitting it! But I'll have to finish the black opals first. More on their progress tomorrow. But I have altered the heel construction on the second one so it might mean ripping back the first one to match. But I'm not being hasty, I'll wait and see first.