Clown barf? June 4, 2008
Do you follow Judy’s blog at all? Earlier this year she posted about some socks that she referred to as her clown barf socks. You want to see clown barf? Check this out. My latest attempt failure with the Figgy Pudding yarn. Ghastly, isn’t it? Notice the lack of knitting needles. Yup. It’s a goner.
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It’s getting so that I just want to throw the yarn out the window and forget it. The only thing really holding me back is that the stuff is soft, lustrous, gorgeous in every way except for how the colors fall. I think this yarn needs another time out—especially after all the time I spent on it last week (not to mention all the other dismal failures I’ve had with it in the last few months), trying all sorts of different stitch patterns, trying to get the colors to behave and not pool so horribly, most of which didn’t last long enough to get photographed and entered into the blog. Drat and double drat.
After a certain point last week when we were in San Diego I got really, really tired of knitting clown barf, so decided to pull out another hank of sock yarn and have a go at something different. This yarn is actually quite a bit darker in real life than it looks in this picture… at least on my monitor. This is a Louet Gems fingering weight yarn in burgundy. 
It’s soft, silky, all one color, and simply lovely. But awful with this stitch pattern. I’ll definitely do something else with this yarn. Later. I got carried away with the stitch pattern, and had to try it with a different yarn. This green stuff is from Tess’ Designer Yarns. It’s gorgeous. Knits up like a dream, but wait until you see what it does to my skin. Yup. It bleeds. I’ll have a photo of that for you soon. Right now it’s too dark to take pictures. That happens at midnight. Most inconvenient. But the first sock is nearly done, and the pattern is coming along nicely.
While we were gone I also made a little (very little) progress on the dress I’m knitting for my dear neighbor Stephanie. Have I told you that I’m knitting her a dress? I spent most of last week knitting clown barf, so not much got done on the dress. Since this Rowan Kidsilk Haze is so fuzzy I decided to put a lifeline in after every repeat. I don’t want to have to suffer through a repeat of what happened with the scarf I knit in basically the same stitch pattern.
Did you hear what happened over at Malabrigo? Be sure to read the top posts in their blog, too. It’s awful! All that yarn. So sad.
Danielle from SW MO June 4
I saw that, it is a bad thing to happen to the nice people at Malabrigo. I haven tried their yarns yet but had planned to when the sock yarn comes out. Good luck on the Clown Barf Socks, I’m getting ready to wind and start a sock from Lime-n-Violet’s Blender Frog color it should be interesting
~Kristie June 4
It’s a shame to waste such wonderful patterns on yarn that doesn’t like them. I hope you’re saving all of those designs for other yarn.
I can’t believe you’re working on a dress among all your other projects. Amazing.
Karen B. June 6
You did your very best with the yarn to try to turn it into socks. C’est la vie, Laura.
Terby June 7
I had some clown barf yarn that resisted being knit into socks, hats, and a scarf. I finally made a Chevron Scarf out of it. An exciting knit? No. But it was the only thing I could do to make the yarn behave.