I’m getting pretty close to catching up on all the blogs I read. It’s interesting reading three or so weeks of blogs in a few days. You see ideas blossom and then spread. One idea I liked I first read about on Rose Red’s blog. The idea of a personal sock club.

I’ve never signed up to a sock club, mainly because I’m pretty fussy about sock yarn. I prefer ‘mostly solid’ colourways, or stripes, and I’m also a bit particular about colours and patterns. So participating in a sock club in which I’ve already chosen the yarn sounds pretty good to me! And it fits in very nicely with a stash diet.

But there were a few down sides that made me hestitate:

a) I’m a bit over socks. (Shock! Horror!) I’m not over knitting socks, though. They’re great travelling projects. But I have so many socks now that I can barely close the drawer. Still, I have the yarn and it’s gonna turn into socks at some point.

b) Complicated sock patterns stop socks from being good travel projects. If I’m going to put that much effort into a project I’d rather it was one of the many garments in my queue. But that’s easy to fix: I’ll just knit plain or simple socks.

c) I, um, actually don’t have much sock yarn. Well, I do and I don’t. This is my stash, starting with the Patonyle:

Then there’s the fancy stuff and the leftovers I reckon I can make socks out of. Two lots of yarn for scrappy socks, two self-striping yarns I had enough left over to make a second pair from (and the originals wore out), and two lots of untouched sock yarn.

Okay, so there’s plenty of Patonyle, but if I’m going to knit with plain yarn I need an interesting pattern, and that isn’t going to fit with my current need for simple patterns. So the fancy stuff and the leftovers are all I have to work with.

But you know what? That’s fine with me. I love knitting scrappy socks, I want to replace the socks that wore out, and I’m dying to knit those the last two fancy yarns in the stash. That makes six projects worth of personal sock club goodness. To add an element of mystery and surprise, I put the six sock projects into paper bags:

And popped them into one of my felt buckets.

They’ll be a kind of lucky dip, except all the prizes are mine, and I know I’ll like them all. I’m not going to set a time limit, which is never a good idea if you’re prone to RSI, though I tend to get a pair knit a month anyway. I’ll just dip in when the last pair are finished. And since I still have the Smoke Sock on the needles, I’ll time my first ‘delivery’ for the day I get those done.

I may never sign up to a non-personal sock club after this. I’ll be totally spoilt!