Not more socks

I definitely have not cast on another pair of socks. Certainly not, I haven’t finished the current pair yet.
Okay, I confess, I have cast on another pair of socks, and not just so I can cheat my yarn diet. I’ll have to actually finish them before I’m allowed more sock yarn.
I’m making some basic socks with some self-patterning yarn. It’s the ladybird from Opal that I mentioned before.
So far, I like it. I’ve done ten rows of k1tbl, p1 rib and three rows of plain old stockinette*. I have less than a full ball (only 94 out of the original 150g) but I’m confident that this is enough for some socks. The difficulty comes in that I prefer to knit cuff-down socks, so I’ll have to guess whether I have enough yarn, and risk having to frog an entire sock. I have split the yarn into two 47 gram balls though, so I’ll only have to do this on one sock. I think that the foot (including toe) must take about the same amount of yarn as the heel, leg and cuff. So if I can decide how much yarn I think the heel takes (perhaps by percentage of stitches or something) then I could use that to calculate how long to knit the leg. Or I could guess. In fact, I probably will just knit til I think it looks long enough.

In other news, I’ve finally got around to ordering a niddy-noddy. I found one on ebay for a reasonable price. It’s an Ashford one. Once that has arrived I plan to skein my cone of 4ply undyed lambs wool into four 100g skeins (approximately) and then it will be ready to dye. That said, I don’t have my Kool-Aid yet. However, I’m considering having a go with food colouring instead. There’s a good tutorial here, at knitty.com specifically about dying with food colouring, and this one contains loads of information about colour theory, what is in food colour and how it works. It is very interesting. I’m hoping that Supercook food colouring will work just as well. I might have to use a steamer as my heat source too, which could make a difference... I’ll document the process, and if it all goes well, I’ll put a “how I did it” on here.

* My spell checker tells me that stockinette is not a valid word, but I’m not sure that I like Microsoft’s spelling of stockinet. So I looked it up on Dictionary.com, and sure enough there it is, spelled stockinette. So I have now added it to my MS dictionary. The spellchecker doesn’t like niddy-noddy either, but is fine with Kool-Aid.