I’ve been enamored with the pomatomus socks since the first day I saw the pattern. The definition of the twisted stitches. The subtle curves formed by increasing and decreasing. The way the ribbing flows into the pattern at the top of the leg and at the heel. Love it. Love all of it. I knew I had to knit a pair of these socks, and soon. And, I wanted to knit them with yarn I already had.

Therein lies the problem. All of my sock weight yarn is either variegated or self-striping. Self-striping would just be bad for this pattern, so I tried to pick the most subtly variegated yarn I could find in my pile-o-yarn.

Turns out, not so subtle after all.

This is a skein of Cherry Tree Hill sock yarn that I picked up on sale a while back. The yarn itself is great… love the texture and “sproingy-ness.” But the color. Oh, the color. Look how the colors distract from the lovely pattern. The pattern is completely obfuscated by the horribly pooling colors of the yarn. Sigh. Even if I knit this yarn into plain old stockinette socks, I’m pretty sure I would still hate the colors and pooling.

I’ll probably knit the second sock at some point. For now, this is my train wreck sock. The one I knew was going horribly wrong just a few rows into it, but couldn’t stop because I just had to see what happened.

Lesson learned - no more purchasing variegated yarn for me! From now on, for patterned socks, I’ll be using solid colored sock yarn only, or perhaps a very subtly shaded yarn. No more variegated. None.