Scotty (my mail man) came to the door with a parcel from the mill that I’ve been eagerly awaiting.

It’s batch of Qiviut Sock Yarn, custom spun for me in a fine fingering weight at 70% Qiviut 20% Merino 10% Nylon.

This batch of 24 100g skeins is a grey-ish brown – compared to previous batches I’ve had spun that were tan-brown and deep chestnut brown.

I’m debating whether to dye a few skeins to use as accent colours as, alas, I have no leftovers to use.

I am a little hesitant though as I wouldn’t want to screw this up by picking the wrong colour that ends up not coordinating well.

I suppose black would be safe and work with the greyness of the yarn. I think I’d actually prefer a deep brown but I’ve got about a dozen different browns and no reference to how they would come out as an overdye to the natural colouring.

And I really don’t want to do the learning curve thing with this fiber!

I keep thinking I’ve totally knit up my cotton stash. Only to stumble on more hiding behind something else. But yet again I missed a dozen balls. Now I’ve knit them and I’m almost sure that I’m done with it.

It’s not that I don’t want to knit cotton any more. It’s that I don’t like stragglers – I prefer to have ‘complete sets’ of socks in a given blend, specially for the bigger shows.

This is Regia Cotton Java colourway #1188, in size Medium, knit with the 54 cylinder on the Legare 400.

And this is colourway #1184, also in size Medium.

Cotton isn’t naturally elastic like wool, so I set my tension 1/4 turn looser.  (Not to be confused with the cotton stretch yarns that have elastic in the blend and tend to knit finer.)

The yardage (400m/100g) is sufficient for a Large pair of socks. I couldn’t squeak through an XL pair though, and fortunately I had a left over to complete with.

I found a stash drawer I’d forgotten about, with ends of Regia Silk, so I put them to use in knitting some more sock scarves.

Regia Silk is 55% Merino 20% Silk and 25% Nylon, and runs the typical 220 yds/50 grams.

I love this yarn but Regia doesn’t seem to care for it….the colourways were few and I haven’t seen any new releases of the Silk Sock Yarn in a couple of years.

For that matter, Regia seems to be getting scarce in Canada. They dropped Diamond Yarns as their Canadian distributor, apparently to self distribute, but I’m uncertain of how this all ended up. (If anyone knows who/where is distributing in Canada please pass it along!)