A little yarn love

I'm one of those seemingly rare knitters who doesn't have a stash problem. In fact, my stash of sock yarn doubled this week when two new skeins came into my life! New yarn is pretty rare chez Brainy, so I'm going to share the love.

First, I bought this skein of Colinette JitterBug for myself at local yarn shop Mouliné earlier this week:


It was love at first sight. The colourway is "Toscana" (#55); the yarn is washable merino. I did some tweaking in Photoshop to get as close as I could to the true colours, but the olive green is actually warmer than it looks in this picture. (The colours look nothing like the product shot on the Colinette site, which is bizarre.) It's gorgeous. Gorgeous!

Then, much to my suprise, reader Sandra sent me a skein of Mountain Colors Bearfoot in return for a small favour:


Again, I tweaked; again, I didn't get it quite right: the colours are actually a tiny bit darker than this. Beautiful. The colourway is "Bitterroot Rainbow"; the yarn is 60% superwash wool, 25% mohair, and 15% nylon. It is so soft! It's my first Bearfoot, and I keep picking up the skein and squeezing it and petting it. Love it.

Now I have four skeins of really great sock yarn in my stash (the other two are Fleece Artist merino that I've been holding onto for more than a year), so I'd better get knitting! As I said, I rarely buy yarn, but I'm making an effort to add quality to my stash. My natural tendency is to be cheap, which means I often end up with something that isn't quite what I actually wanted. But I buy yarn so rarely, and I love knitting so much, that I am really trying to splurge a little bit. It's worth it -- looking at my beautiful four-skein sock-yarn stash makes me very happy, and four skeins is plenty to have on hand.

By far, most of the socks I've knit have used sturdy, practical, inexpensive yarns (e.g., Patons Kroy, Regia 4-ply). That stuff is great -- it wears really well. And because I'm cheap and thrifty, I've always kept the leftovers, even though I had no idea what I'd ever use them for. (What? Not another pair of these eyesores?) And then Robyn came to my rescue! She's making one of these amazing mitred-square baby blankets, so I passed on all of those leftover bits of sock yarn to her at last week's knitting get-together. I loved being able to pay it forward, after Nicole and Jenny both sent me fabulous worsted-weight wool leftovers for my crocheted blanket. And, of course, I loved getting rid of yarn that I wasn't going to use. I'm happy when things that come around go around.