I have been doing some more knitting with my hand spun. Although I enjoy the process of spinning I am primarily interested in creating yarns that I would like to knit with, so it is handy to knit up a bit of my hand spun and get the feedback. This is the yarn I made a couple of years ago with my first fleece I processed from scratch. I wasn’t terribly good at it (there were quite a few felted bits that I couldn’t use), so I ended up plying it with some super wash blue faced Leicester to make it go a bit further.

I had two fleeces, a white Dorset, which I processed first and did very badly, and a grey dorset cross which I did a little better with. So I ended up with two 3ply yarns, one with a strand of white Dorset, a strand of grey Dorset, and a strand of BFL, and the other with a strand of grey Dorset, and two strands of BFL. I then dyed the whole lot in shades of green.

For these socks I used the yarn with grey Dorset and BFL for the leg, and the yarn with grey and white Dorset and BFL for the foot. My rationale being that the one with more Dorset being coarser would hopefully wear better.

I have finished one sock so far and am on the second. The pattern is Cirque Socks from Knitty. I had a bit of difficulty shortening the pattern for my short wide feet. There are only certain points in the pattern repeat where the toe decreases can start, but then I needed to cast off before I managed very many decreases otherwise they would have been too long. They have ended up looking a little bit like a sock for one of Roald Dahl’s witches 🙂