While I’m still under deadline pressure here and have not gotten to the Spanish Hat, I do have some knitting-related musings to report today.
The first is sock yarn wear. I have knit pretty much the same sock in terms of fit since shortly after I began knitting socks. This is especially true for socks knit with sock yarn or fingering weight yarn. I’ve also stuck to a group of sock yarns that are a mix of washable wool and nylon – the standards, Fortissima, Socka, Regia, and Melienweit – all major labels and not house brands or knockoffs. And I’ve not changed the way I care for them. I still do the soak, spin, air dry thing rather than subjecting them to more stressful full machine washing. AND I am always knitting more, increasing the numbers of pairs I own, so that individual pairs are worn less frequently.
So why then are my socks wearing out faster?
This is a big mystery to me. I have several pairs of Fortissima and Socka socks that are pushing their 10th birthday, and were among the first I knit. They’re fine. A bit floppy, but not significantly abraded or worn through. I have other socks knit in the past year that are already showing holes at the ball of the foot.
There doesn’t seem to be any correlation between yarn maker and sock failure. Nor does the failure seem to be related to gauge, since all the victims were knit on the same size needles.
So. Is anyone else experiencing this? Or is it just me…
The second is a product of the need to do mindless knitting. I started another Snake Scarf, knit from an extravagance – Schaefer Yarn’s Helene. This yarn is next-to-skin soft, with all the luster of silk. It is however an Aran weight/light bulky weight single, and like all singles spun from soft yarns, has a tendency to split. I suspect that it will also catch a bit. But it’s lovely stuff, and giving the scarf away will be difficult to do. I can’t identify the exact Schaefer color combo my Helene is (I bought it over a year ago and lost the tag), but it’s mostly navy and raspberry, with hints of brown. The color repeat is however quite short, and does not produce the eye popping striped effect of longer color run yarns. (I’ll be posting a yarn review of the stuff soon).
Still, the subtle mottled effect doesn’t fight too badly with the scarf’s basic wiggly shape or stitch direction, so I’m pleased. On another note, I see that my original write-up of the snake scarf’s beginning is flawed. I’ll be correcting it later this week from my new working notes. Apologies to everyone who has been challenged by it. On the bright side, I only got one note from a confused knitter. The thing is so dead-simple that most people appear to have taken the error in stride and weren’t tripped up by it.
String-Or-Nothing 
What about your shoes, are they the same? That seems to be the only other variable. I’ve been waiting to see wear on my socks, especially the couple pair I made with pure wool, no nylon (one is merino)–but I don’t wear those two as often, because I think they’re more fragile. So far, so good, which is surprising, since I usually pop holes in the toes.
Now, the socks I’ve made for my husband *do* wear out, but they’re made of Cascade 220, and I didn’t reinforce them at all. The current pair on the needles for him will get reinforced toes, since that’s where the stress seems to be.