Thursday, April 24, 2008

How much sock *can* you get from Jitterbug?

One question we are asked a lot is how much sock (meaning length) can you get from a skein of Colinette Jitterbug? Well, I am here to tell you that it's more than you think.

2nd pair of Monkeys (1)

Jitterbug weighs in at 100 grams and sports of length of 320 yards. Which I think might be an under-estimation, because check out how tall my socks are! I have a 9.25-inch foot with a 9-inch circumference; so yes, I may be knitting a smaller sock than you. But I love big socks! And I can not lie! (Seriously, I love a sock that sticks up out of the top of my ultra-high-high-tops. Ask me and I'll show you next time you're in the shop!)

If you are familiar with the Monkey pattern by Cookie A, that's what these socks are (modified to be toe-up, with a picot bind-off). I wanted to use as much of the yarn as possible, so I began by dividing the ball in half (winding it into a ball, putting that ball on a scale, and making a second ball that weighed half as much as the first ball). I decided to go toe-up so I could keep going until I ran out of yarn. In total, I got four full repeats on the foot (plus about two inches for the toe) and six repeats on the cuff (plus a 15-row rib and the bind-off).

I had enough left over at the end that I could probably have even gotten a seventh repeat (eleven rows each, if you're not familiar with the pattern) but at the end of the sixth repeat I tried them on and felt that they were tall enough. And I also felt at that point that my experiment had been proven: you can get quite a generous pair of socks out of one skein of Colinette Jitterbug!

2nd pair of Monkeys (2)

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