Wednesday, January 04, 2006

More socks - this time from alpaca

Handmade Christmas presents are fun to make and give. Part of the fun is the challenge of making the gift without the recipient knowing! I made these socks for dh. Actually, the gift he opened Christmas day were the socks on the needles 75% done. It took a lot longer to knit his socks than it did to do mine because of the secrecy. Once I could knit them in the open, they were quickly finished.



I used the same pattern as before using the large size this time. I actually knit both socks in tandem. I wound the yarn into a center pull ball and worked one sock from each end. When I ran out of yarn, I switched to plain white and finished them up. The colorations aren't an exact match because it was hand dyed roving. I handspun the yarn after dyeing it as well as some of the undyed white. The roving is alpaca neck and leg fiber. It's not something I'd want to wear on *my* neck, but it's absolutely perfect for socks! The durability is supposed to be incredible. Ask dh in a few years what he thinks. His initial opinion is positive with a dash of "could you make the leg longer next time?"

I have another alpaca neck/leg roving project to post about but as that's a present for someone, I have to wait until they open it lest it spoil the surprise!

1 comment:

Kimberly said...

An update:
DH wore the socks only in the evenings after getting ready for bed and mostly stayed upstairs where we have wood floors. By mid-February, he had worn a hole in the middle of one of the soles. I'm not sure how it happened. My best guess is that I didn't put enough twist into the yarn. The roving was made from neck and leg and maybe the shorter neck fibers needed more twist to hold the yarn together. As knitting isn't my favorite activity, it will probably be awhile before I get a chance to test the theory.