Osborn Fiber Studio

In this post, I demonstrate that a pair of red skeins:

Has become a pair of red socks.

I love how dramatically, drastically different these socks are. With an analogous colourway, the colours are not competing with each other as much as they would do in a more wildly variegated colourway. If you want to blend the colours, they will blend!

Out of the two colourways in this study, the red colourway had less range, I think, than the blue. There was less of a value range and less of a colour range.

I’m really glad I preserved the distinctiveness of the different colours in the chain plied sock. You can see that there is value variation. At the same time, the colours don’t compete with each other as drastically as in the blue colourway. So the inevitable jog at the heel turn, and where I started a new strip of fiber, is nowhere near as jarring to me as in the blue sock, below.

In the fractal socks, the more neighborly nature of the relationships between the different colours used meant that they blended so much more than in the blue fractal sock.

The striping is hardly noticeable, aside from at the cuff and toe, where two or three plies were the lightest orange. In the blue sock, I felt that the middle-sized strip of the fractal defined the striping. In the red sock, it seems that the largest strip dominated, with only the gentlest change in variegation throughout the body of the sock.

These socks were a great example of how drastically different your results can be from different colour handling. I think with a complementary colourway, the dots of colour would compete much more, and you’d get a much different effect. Hopefully in a year or two, when I find more time to spin for socks, I can put that question to the test!

P.S. Those are Diamond’s hairs you see sticking to everything. There was a bit of kemp in the Hill Radnor socks, but not quite that much. I’m looking forward to seeing how this sturdy, prickly wool wears on my feet with no reinforcement at all. I knit them on my smallest sock needles – size 0! And they fit snugly. But the spinning was quite fine as well. Is it weird that I’m looking forward to making holes in my socks? Yes, that is weird. But it is for science!