Last night I finished knitting Sideways Spencer and sewed in the ends, but it needs blocking and buttons before having its photo taken, so I’ll leave that blog entry for another time. Now I have the leg and cuff of a sock and the collar of Violet Femme to do before my wips are done and I can start another project.

One of my up-coming projects is Scrappy Socks, inspired by Peevish’s recent odd sock knitting. The other day I dumped all my sock yarn leftovers on the day bed to see what I had:

Immediately I could see that I’ve been quite limited in my sock yarn colour selections. There is a lot of red based, brown based and blue based yarn here. Even the one green yarn is a very brown sort of olive – and that yarn was used to make socks for the beau, not me.

It’s not that I’m unadventurous with colour, but that I love these three colour ranges. Still, when I start buying stash yarn again I’ll definitely be looking for other colours. Like green – I particularly like apple, emerald and olive greens. And I like good saturated purples, too.

Anyway, I didn’t want to combine yarns completely randomly, partly to avoid copying Peevish’s idea exactly, partly because those obvious ranges of colour looked so good together. But should I knit brown, red or blue socks?

I looked at my unknit sock yarn. There are a couple of delicious red colourways and some brown based ones waiting to be knit. Both were worth waiting until I’d knit them up and had scraps to include in scrappy socks. But the two blue balls were of yarn either much thinner than my usual sock yarn, or not so exciting that I’d hold off knitting blue scrappy socks in order to include the yarn. So blue was the best colour selection to start with:

I also threw in some mega boots that had a bit of orange in it, because adding a little of a contracting colour to the dominant colour range adds a bit of zing to a mix.

I can’t wait to start playing, which is certainly adding some much-needed motivation to finish the Blacksmith Socks.