I’m part of the Pomatomus Posse, making socks and gloves for Team Mine in the forthcoming 2008 Ravelympics. If you’re not a knitter, then that sentence, and indeed the rest of this post, is going to seem pretty strange. Sorry.

The Ravelympics is an event timed to start and end with the lighting and extinguising of the Olympic flame in Beijing. Knitters and crocheters (the Ravthletes) have seventeen days to make a project, which has to be challenging for them. My event is the Sock Put.

So far there are about 3,000 people around the world who have signed up to take part in this extravaganza. There are about eighty people in Team Mine, the team of selfish knitters who say ‘No!’ to making stuff for other people. Here’s our team uniform (I get a crown cos I is a Princess!):

Anyway, I’ve been trying to choose yarn for the socks I’m going to make. I ordered some Sheldrige Farm Ultra, which arrived a few days ago.

It is lovely, but I don’t think it will work for the Pomatomas pattern. The problem is that there is such a contrast between colours and shades in the yarn that I think it will overwhelm the lace stitch. I’m of the view that mulitcoloured yarns and lace patterns should be used together with caution, and that, generally speaking, the lace stitches that work best are one that have a horizontal pattern. Pomatomus has more of a vertical lace pattern.

Also, I think the yarn in real life has more contrast than it appeared to in the website photo:

It was still probably a bad choice though. Not to say that I don’t like the yarn. I do, I think it’s lovely. But I think it would look much better as a pair of Jaywalkers, for example. Another project for another day…

So instead I ordered some Smooshy Dream in Colour, which arrived this morning. It’s a beautiful, softly variegated purple yarn:

I think it will work much better with my pattern. Purple seems to be about the hardest colour I have found to photograph; I have no idea why that should be the case, but my camera did not like this colour at all. I took loads of photos to get the picture above, which is pretty close to the actual yarn. In the process I also took this one, which I like just because it looks to me like a big purple-y landscape…