A Bluestocking Knits

I woke up at about 1:30 one morning last week — can’t call it "morning," really, at that point — and found myself reading knitting blogs, as one does, and that sign-ups for Sockapalooza 4 had just opened.  And, well, yes, I signed up!

So, local sock news seems appropriate at this point.  I couldn’t seem to get enough of Jaywalkers after the "Lakeview" pair, and so I cast on in some Supersock in "Java," a gorgeous rich brown.

This is one of the few colorways I’ve tried in which ball and knitted fabric look remarkably similar.  Most of the time, of course, the striping (or, horrors, pooling and flashing) make it look quite unlike the skein.  "Java" does have a mild striping effect, but the colors are so similar and tone and so well-blended that the effect is not of stripes but of gentle ripples of color, as it were. 

I have never been much of a brown person, but this is far from being your average brown.  With a second look, you can see near-blues and almost-reds — it reminded me of a passage in the book I’m reading about Beatrix Potter, and her advice in Peter Rabbit’s Painting Book on mixing Antwerp blue with burnt sienna to make dark brown.  It’s rather hard to capture in a photograph, I find — the general effect in most lights is a bit darker than these pictures, although in bright sunlight, the tan tones are more prominent.

(I have found, in my limited experience, that contrary to Sockamaniac’s review on the Cherry Tree Hill site, some Supersock colorways may pool and flash and some may not.  Even within the same skein, results may vary widely.  You never know.)