While on the subject of socks (and because the cat still hasn’t emerged from the bathroom)…

I have a ‘healthy’ stash of sock yarn. Well, it’s generous by my standards. It’s the part of my stash that I rarely get stashbusting or culling urges over. There was a time when I couldn’t see why anyone would want to knit socks. I laugh at that younger, naive version of myself now. I love knitting socks.

… even though I prefer to knit plain stocking stitch socks.

… even though I only like solid, semi-solid or striped yarn. And the two men I knit socks for on a regular basis have very conservative taste in colours.

… even though I have a stockpile of socks waiting for pairs in my overflowing sock draw to wear out.

As a result I have sock yarn leftovers. Which makes me happy because I also love making ‘scrappy socks’ – socks made from combining leftover yarns. Some of my favourite socks are scrappy socks. (Those were all done with groups of many different yarns.) Half the fun is in matching and mixing colours, making little groupings. They have to look good together, with a combined weight of at least 75-80 grams.

Recently I indulged in a bout of leftovers matchmaking. The obvious ones involved a solid colour added to a varied yarn. This is why I make sure I always have some black, navy, white and grey yarn on hand.

Sometimes there isn’t enough for a two yarn plain/varied combination, and I have to get more adventurous.

The blue/brown combo was inspired by Kerri’s birthday socks, and I particularly love the collection of marled yarns at the bottom.

Two yarns that I’ve found challenging to match with others are the top two in the next pic:

The problem is they’re striping yarns but there’s not much of either, and I didn’t have any leftovers that matched very well. That was until I knit up socks in the blue/green/light green yarn below them. Now I have a leftover yarn that relates to both yarns and there’s enough of it that, together, I have 100 grams of sock yarn.

And I’m loving the way they look together.