An avid sock knitter will tell you that sock yarn “doesn’t count.” What they mean by this is that you can purchase as much sock yarn as possible, but it doesn’t count as stash yarn. It is just there. This is our way of not feeling guilty about owning more sock yarn than can ever be made into socks. My hilarious students Martha and Michelle have taken to using sock yarn as payment for classes with me. The fact that this does occasionally happen says two very amazing things about sock addicted folks: 1. If Michelle and Martha have sock yarn that they are willing to part with, clearly they are impulse buying and have too much to keep at home or hide from husbands. 2. If I am taking said yarn in exchange for knitting classes, I have less sense than they do.

Anyways, so now that we know I have a problem, lets examine what happens when I walk into late night at Knit Happens and someone mentions that the Dream in Color arrived. I ended up going home with two hanks of it! Don’t mind the blurry photo, in my frenzy my hands weren’t able to stay steady enough to hold the iphone.

So the third ball, the one in the middle, that is a hank of Wollmeise sock yarn that I took as payment from either Michelle or Martha…who knows. I started knitting something non sock like with it in an effort to work through my sock stash with something other than socks. The pattern is Woodland Shawl by Nikol Lohr and I was able to quickly memorize it. I love it! But the Woolmeise was too variegated and despite my love for the colorway, it just wasn’t working. Soooooo, my justification for buying TWO hanks of the Dream in Color was that I could use one of them for the Woodland Shawl, which, coincidentally, I am using for a private retreat this weekend.