Everybody in the pool!

Ugh! The subtitle to this post should be: How to turn perfectly lovely yarn into some fugly crap.

I've been knitting a standard short-row toe-up sock a la Wendy J. with that gorgeous "Cha Cha" yarn I showed you last time. In the plain stockinette I've got 64 sts around (on 2.0 mm needles).

My poor little sock started to go horribly wrong very soon after I left the toe , but I just kept going round and round, hoping the pooling would somehow (magically) sort itself out.

It hasn't. I'm getting vast areas of stripes in white, white and black, and on the other side stripes in grey, grey and light blue (which looks like murky blue slush).



Here's the other side:


I got so turned off it last night that I put it away and dug into the Manos vest for DH (okay, so he'll wear it next winter).

But my mind is churning over the pooling problem: I need to find an enjoyable way to coerce this beautiful yarn into showing some better striping distribution. DH suggested working with two balls at a time, alternating every couple of rounds, but I'm not sure I want to go that route. Maybe I should try a wavy motif or a zig-zag pattern. Hmmm... True, I may be one of the only sock-knitters in the western world who hasn't yet made a pair of Jaywalkers.

Help! If anyone out there reads this and has a suggestion or has made something with this yarn - please let me know. I need ideas!

Instead of moping I decided to visit my fellow knit-bloggers for some cheering up. Sure enough, that did the trick. I found the perfect antidote for my petulant mood when I saw the following link over at Laura's. Check out this video: Gangsta Knitters.