Har Dee Har Har

My yarn thinks it's soooooooo funny. It could not stop playing practical jokes on me. Ha freakin ha.

The sock on the right is the first Gypsy Girl sock. This one knit like a dream. I fooled around a little with stitch counts between the leg and the cuff to get a decent barberpole going, but this was a pretty minor fuss considering what the yarn had planned for me.

The sock on the right is the one that was frogged and re-knit umpty-eleven times. The leg is knit from the same yarn as the first sock -- same ball of yarn, I should say -- and if you look closely, you'll see differences in stripe width and a weird color jag at the top of the cuff. Ha ha.

The second sock's foot is knit from the second ball, which tried to make me crazy in the head by pooling and blocking and doing everything but barberpoling. Tee effin hee.

But wait, you say. The foot of the second sock is barberpoling.

Yep. And that's the biggest practical joke of all.

Every. Single. Time. that I knit this yarn, it did weird blobby blocking things in the color. I knit from the inside and the outside of my ball, and got the Exact. Same. Results. This is the whole reason I knit the leg of this sock from the first ball and planned a yarn join somewhere around the point that the disobedient yarn could be covered by my shoe. I don't usually like joins in my socks. One of the advantages of socks is that you don't have to splice or weave. But I could think of no other alternative that would yield sorta matching socks.

After all the game playing, I had to rewind the second ball because all that knitting and frogging from inside and out had turned the ball into a child's crayon scribbles. I already told you about that. An hour and a half project. Sooooo funny, yarn.

And so, with the newly wound ball in hand, I set about to switch yarns just above the heel, and lookee there. Barberpole.

I didn't have to beg, cry, change needles, change stitch counts, or sacrifice any small farm animals to the knitting gods.

It just striped.

All by itself.

Very, very funny.

Ha.

Ha.