Aidan's Socks

When I was visiting my friend, Aidan, in June, he asked me if I would knit him a pair of socks with yellow, orange and green stripes.

Aidan, age 8

When I got home I remembered that I had hand painted some Blue Faced Leicester yarn those exact colours last fall at the yarn dyeing workshop I attended.

At the time, I tried to do fairly narrow bands of colour so as to avoid pooling of colours. Basically I wanted there to be a row or round of one colour, alternating with the other colours.

Believe it or not, the shade of green pictured above is called 'kelly green' . I really wanted to use 'spruce' which was a nice, darkish blue-green but it had run out by the time I got to dyeing this hank of yarn.

Once the dye was set by steaming the plastic-wrapped, Ziploc-encased yarn for an hour, rinsed and dried, it looked like this after rewinding into a skein.

The yellow adjacent to the kelly green made a lime green colour. The orange stayed pretty orangey.

I used fairly small needles so it would make a very sturdy fabric as there is no nylon to strengthen it. They will have to be hand washed but it doesn't involve too much extra work - basically soaking them for 20 min. in tepid water with wool wash, pressing the water out of them, rolling them in a towel to get more water out and laying flat to dry.

This evening I finished the second sock.

This is the first project I've completed with my hand painted yarn. Although the final product might not be exactly what Aidan envisioned, I hope he likes them anyway. It was fun to knit them for him.