Here it is, my latest creation. This project was doomed from the start. I consider it a “learning project†in that my goal was to practice a particular technique, not create a beautiful pair of socks.
However.
This started out as KnitPicks Bare sockweight yarn. My original intention was to create self-striping yarn in blue and bronze for a pair of Hogwarts socks, with less self-stripeyness in the foot part.
I wound it out across my RV so I could dye it:
I dyed it. It did not come out right. Why I thought I could make “bronze†out of “yellow and black,†I do not know. My color wheel is flat– I need to call AAA. That day, I also dyed some yellow and black yarn and some blue and green yarn (which came out very pretty, by the way), all in the same sock weight.
Then, in the course of balling it, I turned it into a horrible tangled mess. I spent about 6 hours detangling the horrible tangled mess. Outside. In the dark. To be fair, my mom had just gone into the hospital with a life-threatening illness and I couldn’t be there, so this was really just my way of trying to have some control over the smallest part of my world that day.
After balling the yarn, I put it aside for a few months (about 6).
Recently, I made a pair of socks using the Queen Kahuna Crazy Toes & Heels method and the yellow and black yarn:
I liked how they turned out, but wanted to practice the technique a bit– I wasn’t satisfied with the pointiness of the heels, and wanted to fix that part of my understanding of the pattern.
So, I set out to knit up this botched dye job.
Did I mention that I set out to make self-striping yarn? I did. Did I also mention that I originally dyed the yarn to have a big section of blue before getting into the stripes? No? That’s because after 6 months of the yarn hibernating (maturing?), I forgot entirely about the band of blue. So, the self-stripes go: Big band of blue, yellow, blue,yellow,blue, yellow, blue, (etc.), then Big band of blue-yellow-blue-yellow-blue (etc.) Get it? They repeat, but only in one direction.
Since the socks originally were going to be top-down, this would have been fine, if I was still using the top-down method. It would have been fine if I had remembered this and had wound off from the single ball of self-striping yarn the amount needed for the socks, and knitted them separately. However, since I did not remember the Big Band of Blue, I knitted from both ends of the ball (center and outside), so I have BigBandBlue-yellow-blue-yellow-blue-yellow, blue-yellow-blue-yellow-BigBandBlue.
Make sense? No? Let me show you:
Yes. Not only did I do this incredibly stupid thing, but I then continued to knit these socks into knee socks (they are actually the same length; it’s just posing that makes them look uneven there).
I don’t know what I was thinking. I’ll never wear these socks. I never wear knee socks anyway. I never go anywhere cold enough for frost, much less cold enough to require an entire layer of wool from my toes to my knees. My shins just don’t get that cold!
On the other hand, if my husband ever needs to have me institutionalized, he can bring these socks to the sanity hearing. They’ll lock me away for good!
Now. Fess up, all of you. What have you kept knitting even though you knew it was going to be horrendous when you finished?
[Cross-posted from Ravelry’s Hall of Shame group.]