When you lose at yarn chicken…

This past Friday evening I decided to finish up a pair of socks I’ve been working on for the Giant. These were started while I spent my time on the West Coast. When I originally packed for the trip out there I did so with the space being at a preimum. Which meant that I needed to pick items that would last me out there, and so I decided to pack the makings of a laceweight sweater and as an almost afterthought/just in case I tossed in a skein of sock yarn and some bamboo needles. Unfortunately for me the sweater ended up being a hot mess that got frogged after too many issues. Luckily for the Giant the socks became my knitting project.

I ended up making the socks a bit longer than normal, simply because I could, or so I thought. The yarn was new to me, but is was self striping and it was decent to work with. The first sock was completed by the time I got home and I had the Giant try it on, of course the longer sock ended up fitting him great. I merrily cast on for the second sock without a care in the world. I even managed to get the socks to match in striping (point for me.)

So here we are Friday night and I am zooming along the foot of the sock when I start to notice a quickly shrinking yarn ball, at this point it was more a yarn ameba but I digress. Now I had said I hadn’t worked with the yarn before, but of course I naturally assumed that sock yarn would be in the 400+ yards range. I was right about that, thankfully I just forgot to calculate adding in another twenty rows per sock. Which meant that around the time I was ready to start winding down I was met with this picture. 

 

 

 

 

You may notice the very messy and small looking amount of yarn in that picture. I was a little nervous, but not really that worried. As I had said earlier I had managed to get the stripes to match on the socks, which meant I had some yarn in reserve. This reserve yarn also happened to match the stripes almost perfectly. I kept knitting and realized far too late on Friday night (technically Saturday morning) that it was not going to work. I frogged back to the black stripe seen above and called it a night.

Saturday I figured if I fudged the toe decreases by a row or two it wouldn’t matter. So that is what I did, this time I was a lot closer, but just shy again. So I frogged back and looked at my yarn and looked at my scraps and realized I had a bit extra of the green stripe. I used the green stripe as my “last stripe” and when I reached the right number of rows I started decreasing (basically I started them earlier again, but even earlier if that makes sense.)

Of course this brought me even closer to making it but still a little short. So I made the decision, I was going to lose at this game of yarn chicken. I asked the Giant what he wanted done for the toe, I had some extra black yarn on hand, but really the world (or my yarn stash) was his oyster. He ended up making a decision and I finished up the socks.

I now firmly believe, if you are going to lose at yarn chicken you gotta go big or go home.

Sock stats-
Yarn: Regia Stadion Color
Colorway: White,Green,Black
Pattern:My own vanilla with twenty extra rows in the leg
Needles:2.25