What's on the needles?

So on Wednesday I finished up this sock...

This is Blue Moon Fiber Co. Socks that Rock in the Supercolourfraglistic colorway. These colors are so vivid - that turquoise glows. And I had every intention of casting on the 2nd sock when Judy posted about color pooling and showed her sock in the Into the Whirled Pakokku yarn "Fierce and Fearless". Well I had purchased this same colorway and I HAD to cast it on. Here is side one.

and side two...

Oh my goodness! This is EXACTLY the kind of pooling and flashing I was hoping for. Now when I first saw Judy's sock I assumed she has cast on 60 stitches like she had for her "Bigger on the Inside" pair. I cast on 60 stitches and knit about an inch, and it was apparent that I wasn't going to get the pooling, instead I was getting the stripe pattern. Grrrr... not what I want. So then I actually read Judy's post (instead of just looking at the pretty pictures) and saw that she had cast on 64 stitches. I didn't want to redo the cuff so I just added 4 stitches to the first knit round and what do you know... I got pooling! Yippee! It just blew my mind how much difference 4 extra stitches per round could make.

Which got the little hamster wheels in my brain spinning. I wondered if doing 64 stitches with the "Vampires of Venice" colorway I finished up last week would have resulted in more pooling and less striping. Here are the results of this little experiment. On the left is the sock done with 60 stitches and on the right the 64 stitch version.

Side one...

and side two..

Now there seems to be more pooling happening in the 64 stitch version sock. However as I approached the heel turn I could see that the yarn was reverting to the stripe pattern again. So I would say that this experiment is marginally successful in obtaining more pooling with more stitches. But in the end the yarn does its thing, and stripes reappear. As I stated yesterday, you don't have a lot of control and the way the yarn is dyed strongly influences the pattern.

So this poses another question. Could I dye yarn that will be more likely to pool? I am definitely going to try to do this when the weather warms up. I think the key will be to rewind the skeins into longer skeins and then dye them. I think that shorter bands of colors in close proximity will get the pooling effect when they "stack" up as you knit. I can't wait to see if this works - boy I wish Spring would get here.

Hope you have a lovely weekend ahead of you. If you've gotten snowed on, I hope it melts very soon. I'm planning a quiet stay home weekend. I got enough strips cut to finish the blocks for my Scrappy Trips blocks. I've got some cross stitch projects that are calling my name and of course there is plenty of sock yarn to be knit.

Happy stitching-
carol fun