Sampling.

It’s one of those things that as a fibre person you either love or hate doing.

I’m sort of in the middle now. I started hating doing it. I didn’t want to take the time and just get into the project.

One thing taking my spinning course has taught me though is that sampling will give me a better end product. It will make it easier to get the final result that I want rather than having it be more hit and miss.

So now I still don’t like to make many samples, but I do try to see what the results of different methods will produce.

I’m getting ready for a talk I’m giving in February to my local spinning guild. It is on spinning for socks and some techniques for knitting toe up socks.

I’ll be covering things like types of fibres to use, different spinning and plying methods, and different knitting methods.

So this is a perfect time to make a bunch of samples to show off all of these things.

I’m planning on making a bunch of small socks. The socks use about 45-50 yards of yarn, and about 25g or 1oz of fibre. I doesn’t take to long to spin up the yarn and the socks can be easily knit over an evening.

For those that might be interested, here is a basic pattern you can use to make a small sock like the one in the picture. I’m going to format it better and will post it later as a free download.

These small socks would make pretty Christmas tree ornaments or small stocking stuffer socks! Since they don’t use a lot of yarn they are perfect for using up those scraps of sock weight yarn that you may have lying around.

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