I wound off more yarn last night. Sadly, the skein of "Mountain Goat" I'd had for a while (and which I had kept "out" in a paper bag sort of storage before I discovered how persistent carpet beetles can be in finding their quarry) had a number of breaks in it. #()$*#$. I was planning on making the cabled mittens from the new "101 Designer One-Skein Projects" book. Oh, I still will. But I'll probably grumble every time I have to join the yarn.

Do people throw out "munched" yarn? I mean, if it's in mostly big pieces? I'm too frugal to do that.

I will say all the sockyarn (numerous skeins of Lisa Souza yarn and a couple skeins from a place called "jojoland" that I bought at Yarn Again in McKinney) were okay.

I found the pattern (it's this one, from Needle Beetle and the yarn I bought for it. I'm going to do Thessalonica in the recommended colors. (I didn't feel like trying to figure out alternative colors that would work when I bought the pattern). It's very involved and will probably be a good winter-vacation project, at least to start (I anticipate these will become another pair of year-or-multi-year-long socks, like Canal du Midi or the Miranda socks). I'm going to do the larger size, and I'm contemplating using needles a size larger than recommended - my history with colorwork is that it comes out VERY tight when I do it, and I don't want the socks to be too small.

I also wound off some other colors of her yarn I've bought over time - Mother of Pearl (very very light pastels on a cream background; I'm considering it for the Viking sock pattern). I also wound off a skein of something called Gendarme (dark red, navy blue, sort of a golden tan - very pretty when it's wound off) and Blueflame (yes, like the gas company advertisement), which is brilliant colors of blue, yellow, red, and orange.

I'm definitely contemplating a slipped-stitch pattern for Blueflame, to try to break up a tendency towards pooling that I suspect may happen. With Gendarme, I'm not sure - I'd LIKE to do some kind of cabled socks but I'm not sure whether (a) the cables would get lost or (b) if it would pool like crazy and therefore be best as a slipped stitch pattern. Or maybe dig around and see if I have a solid color that coordinates and do some kind of simple "cheater" colorwork - where you let the variegated yarn do the work of several different colors.

I love the handpainted yarns and often am attracted to the more vibrant color combinations, but actually knitting them up so they look good can be sort of a challenge. (It would help if I knew whether "blueflame" or "gendarme" striped rather than pooled, because if they stripe instead of pooling, that makes the situation easier.)

Another option would be to knit alternate rows from different ends of the skein. (I don't have any good way to try to equally divide a skein into two parts. Someday I'd like to get a line-counter, but I've read that some of the commercially-available ones aren't that reliable.) And a balance wouldn't work for me - I'd have to keep pulling the growing ball off the ball-winder and it would probably collapse.