Ripe for conversion

Up close and looking... socky.

the skinny

Pattern: Convertible, from this spring's Knitty

Yarn: Lana Grossa Meilenweit Cotton Fantasy sock yarn, 45% cotton, 42% wool, 13% polyamide, in colour 809

Needles: 4 mm Addi Turbos

Pattern modifications: None as such; I stopped after 14 buttonholes, rather than 16, but otherwise it was knitted entirely to pattern.

Time sucked: About two weeks, from 20 May till 8 June, knitting pretty constantly while I read during the day.

Aargh

I'm not sure about this entire project, and haven't been from start to finish. I was seduced by the fabulous flexibility of the stole-with-buttonholes concept, and jumped on the first yarn I found to make it. I'd heard before that sock yarn is a good idea for making stoles with, but it was horribly, horribly inelastic. Perhaps the places where I heard this rumour were American knitting blogs, written by knitters who have access to seductive silky merinoey handpainted sock yarn. Perhaps this yarn had too little wool to adapt properly to knitting lace. As it was, knitting it was a pain: the yarn was completely inelastic, as I've said, and the shiny needles were completely wrong for it, so the stitches kept falling off. Moreover, the lace pattern was actually very, very dull to knit. I think I prefer lace with pretty figurative patterns where you can go "Look! I just completed a leaf!" rather than this kind of quiet repetitive pattern.

I'm not sure how I feel about the FO: I still love the colours of the yarn, and I'm hoping that a cotton/wool blend will indeed be, as the label promises, "klimatisierend". I've yet to buy buttons for it (which I am ridiculously excited about, as Knopf Paul is an emporium of delights and wonders), and I think I'll wait till I've actually tried it on in all its permutations before I decide whether or not to keep it.