Yarn Genetics

Last week I finished knitting the first Hippy Dippy Tie-Dye sock for Poppy and started up on the mate the next day. It was from yarn she'd sent me - one skein was still in its ball band and the other was already rolled into a ball with no ball band but they're the same yarn. Poppy said so.

When I was rolling the yarn for the second sock into a center pull ball I perhaps should have noticed something but didn't. And when I was knitting the cuff I began to become suspicious but, you know, who memorizes the characteristics of yarn? It was after I'd gotten a couple inches on the cuff that I noticed that things were a bit off and after examining the yarn closer I saw that the color repeats on the second ball of yarn are noticeably shorter than the first. My only guess is that while they're the same yarn and same colorway, they're either from different dye lots or else the planets went out of alignment and that German yarn company with all its conformist German workers broke bad and made a big dyeing error in that lot.

Here's a bit of the leg from the first sock:



and here's a bit of the leg from the second:



Definitely different. However, maybe it's not such a bad thing. They're Hippy Dippy Tie-Dye socks, after all. One would expect them not to conform to expectations. They're free spirit socks. They're the sort of socks that would attend Berkeley and put flowers in the barrels of the guns of National Guardsmen. If they were at Woodstock they'd have been hanging off the Who's helicopter.

They're just going to be fraternal instead of identical twins.