Wednesday, February 03, 2010

Knitting Again, With Yarns from the Reagan Administration

2008 and 2009 were years of limited fiber fun for me. Building the new house and working several part-time jobs caused a time squeeze and cut into my blogging energy as well. I'm sure anyone who ever read my blog for knitting trivia has long since given up on me. But no matter how involved I get in other things, eventually I always get back into the textile game.

I had assembled a collection of yarn scraps to make these scrappy socks several years ago. This winter, when I was organizing my new closets, the bag turned up, and I remembered the color motif I'd intended for the socks. It seemed like the perfect project to restart my fiber mojo, especially because, in our nice new house, it is possible, even pleasurable, to pad around the floor in a pair of bulky socks.

These socks are made from crunchy, faux-homespun "hippy-girl" worsted weight wools, left over from other projects or bought from yarn-store sale bins during the Reagan administration. (Those were rough years for the hippy-girl market, and I took advantage of that.)

By the end of the Reagan administration, the shiny novelty yarns were also hitting the sale bins, and that's when I acquired this slubby, slippery rayon yarn. I've tried for years to find something useful to do with these rayons, but they are really impractical, and they look busy and unattractive in texture stitches or lace knitting. I knitted this pink rayon into a garter stitch scarf a couple of weeks ago.

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