Today’s fixation is Shibui Knits sock yarn. TheBoy has been asking for socks since fall ’04 when we first started living together. At the time, I made my father and one of my fathers-in-law worsted weight boot socks for Christmas. TheBoy? He got the yarn for his in a box. And then I only knit one.

Now, my husband, bless his heart, has big feet. Size 13 wide big. So I knew if he was going to get the socks he wanted I’d better find some yarn (and a lot of it) that I’d enjoy knitting miles of sock with. I always seem to get the urge to buy yarn around nine o’clock at night, after everything local is closed so I’ve started buying yarn online from Knit/Purl. It’s semi-local (in Portland) and my orders arrive within 2-3 business days of placing an order. I think this was the third or fourth order I’ve placed with them since October or so and I’ve always been pleased. So while I wholly endorse the yarn shop, let’s talk about the yarn.

Look at the colors! The depth of color is wonderful and their semi-solid nature is fantastic. I’m knitting this into a fairly dense fabric (9 stitches per inch on size 1 crystal palace bamboo double pointed needles) and it’s still sproingy and wonderful as a fabric. The twist is wonderful, it’s a very round yarn which leads me to believe that it would make wonderful tiny cables, although the socks are likely to be far more boring than that. Shibui Knits is a Portland-based company, so I’m doubly supporting my local community (although I believe the yarn is milled elsewhere).

I planned for each sock to use about a skein and a half of yarn, that’s almost 300 yards each. They’ll be primarily seaweed with contrasting toes, heels and a stripe at the top of the cuff. I expect them to take me a fair amount of knitting time, but it’s the kind of knitting that sets my mind on auto-pilot. They’ll be my “knitting with other people” project, or my “knitting and actually paying some attention to the tv” project.