started something new

 Yes, I have lots of ongoing projects (including the second of those extremely-bright pastel socks, which I started over the weekend) but I wanted a NEW project.

And I thought of something I had in my stash - a yarn from a relatively-new-to-me dyer, someone who sells through Etsy under the name UP North Yarns. She is in Powers, and I know right where that is - it's not too terribly far from Rapid River, where relatives of mine lived. (They're almost all gone now). 

She has some really nice colorways, including several named for locations in the UP. (I have a skein of the Kitch-iti-Kipi inspired one, for mitts). I also have "Petoskey Stone," and when I'm up for a more complex pattern, I have a hexagon twisted-stitch pattern (the coral in Petoskey stones has a hexagonal pattern)

This one, though, is one of the first I bought and just because I liked it. It's called Cosmic Dust - black, with short runs of neon colors. And it has a sparkly thread in it; I'm a sucker for sparkly sockyarn

So I wound it off tonight. (It doesn't look as true to color in the picture of the yarn cake)

That's also the little Fossil Forager green leafhopper plushie/bag charm I got - it was on a Kickstarter and she got enough orders, so I got mine a week or so ago.

I cast on for just simple socks - I'm going to do maybe 2" of ribbing and then just knit them plain, as I usually do with yarns where I want the colors to show off. It's a pleasing yarn to knit:

 

That's almost an hour of knitting for maybe not quite an inch of ribbing. Working with fingering weight yarn can be slow, and ribbing is slower to knit (because you have to flip back and forth to do the knit and purl alternations) than knitting plain in the round is.