These are my first pair of socks from Yarnia yarn. This is one of the house blends that is very popular named Boylston. (If the online shop is out of stock you can always call or email them and ask them to make you up another cone of Boylston. If they have the ingredients they'll be happy to whip you up a cone.) This yarn is 50% Bamboo, 27% Merino, and 23% alpaca. This picture really shows the depth of color.
The yarn is composed of four strands: one navy bamboo, one navy merino, one bright blue merino, and one heathered gray alpaca. I think the color is perfect for manly things, which is nice because sometimes it can be hard to find "manly" yarn. Of course, this didn't stop me from making these socks for me.
I have found that Yarnia yarn sometimes has a weird quirk to it. As you knit, sometimes one or more of the strands will get "loose" like you have more of those strands than the other, so you have to slide the excess down as you knit so that you're working with a length of yarn where all the strands are the same tension. If you've worked with Yarnia yarn before you might know what I'm talking about. It's a minor annoyance and slows knitting a bit. In the few instances where it's become completely unmanageable I just cut the yarn, trim the strands with excess down, join, and continue on.
The pattern is just a simply 64-stitch sock. I followed the Yarn Harlot sock recipe the first time I made these, but now I just knit from memory. The only thing I have to look up each time is how many stitches to knit/purl across for the first two rows of the heel turn. I just grab any of my many sock books off the shelf and flip through till I find a sock with a heel flap worked over 32 stitches and use the numbers there. Some day I'll memorize that too and then I'll be able to make socks completely from memory. I think that's cool.
This yarn is a bit heavier than a traditional fingering weight, not quite a sport, but close. At 64 stitches on size 1.5 needles it made a very dense fabric. These would be perfect hiking socks and a great for walking around the house when it's not quite cold enough for slippers but you still want something on your feet. I won't be wearing these for a while it seems though. It's finally spiked up into the 80s here in Portland and I've been able to bust out the sandals. The warm weather is totally worth having to put off wearing my new socks for a few months.
