I do maintain that I am trying to use only stash yarn at the moment to clear out some of the oddments that I have which are just right for baby-size knits. It makes good sense to save my yarn money for more important stuff like nappies and other useful baby paraphernalia, and I’d also like to be able to shut the lids on the plastic boxes which hold my stash… It’s not an ideal scheme: I still choose patterns according to what I want to knit rather than necessarily choosing them according to the yarn have in my stash, which means that I have bought the odd ball of yarn recently. But sometimes something that I did months ago will also cause my stash to increase…

Back in early February, I pre-ordered two skeins of Crystal Palace Mini Mochi from The Woolly Workshop. Not surprisingly, I’d half-forgotten about it over the following months but then it arrived on my doormat and I am smitten.

I chose the Neptune Rainbow colourway as I plan to use it for manly socks for Mr B’s spoilt feet. He approves of the colours, too, which means I can’t use that as a reason to knit socks for me instead, sadly. It’s a gorgeous blend of blues, greens and purples which are a lot brighter than the photo on the Crystal Palace website, and he so wouldn’t have chosen it for his socks until I started knitting them!

The yarn has a 20% nylon content which should mean it wears well and it feels wonderfully soft and is named after an actual cat which is just silly and I love it. It does seem to be slightly unevenly spun, but I like that. I know there are a lot of comments on Ravelry about it being prone to knots and splitty, but hopefully this being a new batch will mean my yarn is unaffected.

Once the Having Hope socks are done, these are the next manly socks in line. Though they’d make wonderful Wimbledon knitting in plain stocking stitch, which might mean a bit of queue jumping!