I am working on two baby blankets right now, for friends who are going to be welcoming their first children in 2010.  For reasons I can no longer remember, I decided to go with Madeline Tosh Worsted yarn. I bought it from Webs. I used the colorways Fjord and Clematis. The Fjord came right away and the colors of the 4 skeins I received were pretty similar.  The Clematis skeins were backordered, and arrived after three and a half weeks. When I did get them, they weren’t at all consistent, and two of the skeins look nearly navy or black, while the other two are nicely variegated. This is an annoying but not impossible set of circumstances to fix. Still, I am shaking my fist at the losers at Webs who gave me four non-matching skeins of yarn. I understand that they’re hand-dyed, but I’m pretty sure that they’re matched by humans, and whoever put this order together probably could have done a better job at making sure my four skeins matched.

Fjord. Awesome.

Clematis. Less awesome.

I was going to make my exchange socks out of Nature’s Palette Fingering yarn, but the two skeins broke approximately 100 times while I was trying to wind them. I now have two quart bags of microballs, and one sandwich bag of all the rest of the string that was too short to even wind. Bummer. I’m glad that I’m seeing this now, but I still find the whole thing so disappointing. I have other yarn that I could use, but I had this picture in my head of how I wanted my socks to look and now I think that this probably will not be how they end up.

The only thing that makes me feel a little better is that this yarn is not the yarn that I was excited about last week. I decided that that yarn would be better used in another project, but that this would be perfect. Stoopid me!