Yarnsanity

Did I mention the word "insanity" in my profile? Yes? Oh good.

To date I have wound some of my skein of Sock Wars KnitPicks Bare into a small ball, knitted it, frogged it and measured it: about 30" makes a round of 44 stitches. I reckon the Sock Of Doom will be about this or maybe a few stitches less.

I have cut a piece of cardboard down to 10", and wrapped yarn around it in three different places. I have pulled it off in mini-hanks, soaked it and slung it into three cups full of different colours of Kool-Aid, cooked it in the microwave, rinsed it, left it to dry, rolled it into a tiny ball and knitted it once again.

It looks nice.

This is SOOOOOO not like me. If it weren't for a start-date that was a week away, I would be half way up the first sock, without so much as a gauge swatch. But the forced inactivity (as regards this particular yarn, at least), is making me very ambitious.

So.

I just worked out how many wraps I have to do, into three different hanks, to get a roughly similar number of stripes of each colour; thus:

yarn-monkey says that 180 yards are needed for a pair. That's 90 yards a sock. That's 270 feet, or 3240 inches. My piece of cardboard is 10" high, so I can wrap one sock's worth of yarn around it 324 times. Every three wraps equals (I figure) a round on the sock. So each sock will have 108 rows. I have three colours in mind. So I should do 36 rounds' worth (or, oh look how nicely the maths worked out; 108 wraps) for each colour. Twice.

But of course, I want them to stripe, so I'll have to lay out the loops I wind, shamrock-like, in multiples of 3.

This is why I like short deadlines. See what I do to myself when I'm given time?