I’m giving in and knitting a pair of socks for myself — purple socks, to be exact. I’m using the yarn from the Gigantic Cone of Unknown Composition. It is a huge cone of yarn I got at The Yarn Exchange in DeKalb, IL in 2002. I’m sure that when I bought it, I knew what kind of fiber it was. There is a label on it, so maybe some day I’ll call the store and see if they can figure it out for me. For now, I’m assuming that it’s acrylic, maybe a blend.
Looking at the website for The Yarn Exchange, it doesn’t look like they’re set up the way they used to be. When they opened, they carried some Brown Sheep, and a couple of other brands, but mostly they had shelves lining the store, filled with these gigantic cones. You could either buy a specific weight, which they’d wind into balls for you, or you could buy the whole cone (by weight), and if you were done with it in a reasonable amount of time (I think it was thirty or sixty days), you could take it back, they’d weigh it, and refund you the difference. It was really neat. Of course, that would be difficult to do on-line, so maybe they just don’t have that on their website, and they still do it in the actual store.
Regardless, I’m making the socks. I’m using the generic sock pattern from The Knitter’s Handy Book of Patterns, from Interweave Press.* I don’t anticipate becoming one of those people who can’t stop making socks. I’m actually getting tired of all of the sock patterns that are out there (although Q from the new Knitty is really interesting). I did need to learn something new, though. Hopefully this will help pull me out of my funk.
*This completely confused me at first. With a title like that, I assumed it would be from the publishers of Knitter’s magazine.
