socks vs. shawls

Lately I've been thinking a lot about sock yarn. I've decided to focus my business on hand-dyeing and hand-spinning yarn for the time being. I will probably add other areas later, but I tend to pull myself in too many directions at once and confuse myself. Starting a business is complicated enough without doing that. I'm working on all the legal stuff right now, and let me just say blech.
For dyeing, sock yarn is so popular right now, it seems like a good place to start. And last night I had a small epiphany: one of my favorite yarns of all time is actually a sock yarn, though I didn't know it when I bought it.


This is Brooks Farm Yarns Acero. Acero means steel in Spanish, and its metallic look is what made me exceed my yarn budget and buy it. It's a fingering weight yarn, 60% Superwash Wool, 20% Silk, and 20% Viscose. It comes in 4-ounce/420 yard skeins. It is springy and bouncy and gorgeous. I bought it at the Pittsburgh Knit and Crochet Festival as an antidote to my scratchy yellow Red Heart learning-to-knit project, and it is a total joy to crochet with. It's also my first "real" (non-mass-produced, mostly natural material) yarn. Love love love it!


This project has been on the back burner for a good while, but I pulled it out last night and fell in love all over again. It's a shawl.


It was going to be a really big shawl (I bought two skeins), but the more I think about it, I may just finish off the last of this skein (probably another 3 rows or so) and leave it at that.
So I already have an easy pattern that I designed that I can post with my new line of sock yarn for the non-sock folks. Bonus!