Yarn rant

[notyourwendy]

Screw you, Patons Yarns, and your utter inability to make the color or strand wrapping within your dye lots even remotely similar from ball to ball. 

This is the third sock project I've done with Patons Yarns where the two socks are clearly not similar.   Two were out of the Kroy line and while the dye lots may have been good, I couldn't tell because the strand wrapping was so off that it looks like I didn't even buy two of the same colorway, much less two of the same dye lot.  The current project is from the Silk & Bamboo yarn it what would be a lovely plum color, if the dye lot could decide on which shade of plum it would like to be.  I'm willing to bet my next paycheck that the nice spring green color I bought at the same time as the plum is going to have a similar issue.  I'd return it, but I tossed the receipts ages ago and have re-balled the yarn. 

I'd just scrap the current project, but I'm on vacation and have no other yarn with me (oh woe!) so I may as well finish knitting up this mess and, I don't know, make a name for myself as the chick with the mismatched socks, or something.

As an aside to the ranting, can anyone explain or show me some general math on how to work out a gusset heel on toe-up socks?   I can see there's some repeatable ratio from foot stitches to adding gusset stitches, to picking up for the heel, to leg stitches, but I can't work it out on my own.

Comments

[pensnest]

Personally I embrace the mismatch, but that's because the only socks I have made so far have been from variegated yarns, and I don't care a bit about finding the right place in the colour to start the socks to match. (What a dreadful sentence, does it make sense at all?)

But if you have to use more than one ball to create your socks, why not start both socks at the same time, and knit the foot from one ball and the upper from the other? Or stripe them?

[notyourwendy]

Two sets were from variegated yarns and I figured that the stripes wouldn't match up and was cool with that. I think what actually went wrong was the strand wrapping, which means that the stripes aren't even the same color..

I didn't do that because I assumed the stripes would work out on their own and then I got past taking the heels apart three times because I kept messing them up and the stripes still didn't appear in one sock and I was so tired of fighting with the heels that I just said screw it and finished the socks. I have a ball winder and the next time I think I'm just going to split the balls in half.