Seasons turning

by dixie

I heard odd noises as I got ready for work today. Even though it’s been several years since I’ve worked in a group that actually does experiments, I’m still jumpy about noises that are out of the ordinary or not immediately explainable. (In a proper lab, odd noises often mean something is broken, and that something might be toxic.) At first, I thought it was my landlords, doing something behind the house possibly involving a large tarp. Then I thought maybe it was the next door neighbo(u)rs…dumping water into my yard?

It was nearly a minute before I acknowledged it might be rain. Turns out it was indeed rain, a brief but impressive downpour of gigantic raindrops that lasted about two minutes. My next sock project is unintentionally appropriate for this odd and rare turn of weather.

The first installment of sock yarn in that club that nearly killed Mick when he read about it is a colourway called “Monsoon” to commemorate the rainy season. This yarn comes from a place that actually has rain, so when I got it I thought, “Well, that’s nice. I can think about the memory of rain.” And so I’ve had “Desert Rose” in my head whenever working with it.

It's a muddy looking yarn, I swear.

It smells slightly of vinegar, which shouldn’t excite me as much as it does. But I know vinegar is used to set the dye, so it’s a reminder of the fact that this skein was painstakingly handpainted by the hard working ladies over at BMFA.

Variegated yarn is tricky. It doesn’t work out for everyone, and even when it does work out for someone, it might work out in a way that someone else will hate. Handpainted yarn like this is even more tricky. So although others have gotten their socks to stripe very nicely, mine has stubbornly decided to pool in a way that looks kinda interesting but not really what I’d like. The funny thing is that some people work really hard to get this vertical striping effect from handpaints or variegated yarn. I just don’t like it that much.

I’m trying hard to love my sock in progress, but the vertical striping vexes me, especially since the colours I like the best (representative of a stormy sky) are pooling on the bottom of the foot and the ones I like less (representative of the muddy earth the monsoon is flooding, covered with a small vegetative blanket) are pooling on the instep. Here I show you the sock’s top and bottom in the same picture, which also illustrates another tiny problem with the pattern:

Just one sock, pasted into the same image

I can’t really take this one to work.