I’ve been thinking of casting these on for a few days now. The perfect name for them just came to me - Mocha Roca Rooibos. There’s this sweet tea house down the road from me, The Emerald Necklace Inn, where Sarah and I have gone for high tea a few times. It’s nothing horribly impressive (not like Osiyo used to be), but she and I both loved this particular blend of tea. Since I’m using the Earl Grey pattern but using a deep reddish-purple yarn, I immediately thought of the deep auburn mauvey shades of the rooibos leaves.
This will be my second pair of socks from my self-imposed sock club - yay!

4/17 - I actually abandoned this a few days after starting the socks. I just didn’t like how the yarn was working up on the bigger needles - it wasn’t showing off the cable definition the way I wanted it too. I figured I should drop down from size 2.5 to 2.0 mm and that I might need to mess with the pattern a bit. So I abandoned them to do my Jaywalker socks. Those also ended up needing some messing about, but not as much. I’d love to finish these this month. I know that I wanted to do a pair of socks a month, but I’m just not sure that’s going to happen right now. I’m in finishers mode which means I want to finish all the stuff currently on my needles, rather than cast on for my 4th pair of socks for my self-imposed club. The way I see it, my goal is to knit a dozen pairs of socks in 2011, NOT do a pair of socks a month. Summer is coming which means soon, I’ll want small transportable projects…like socks. So I think I can let myself slide on only being on my 3rd pair right now. I’m enjoying the socks more on the 2.0 needles, they’re definitely looking more like what I want them to. I’m not sure about how the cable is showing up…I feel like it blends a bit with the colour of the yarn, but I think I’m going to keep going until they’re a goodly length.

May 28th - Another project, off the needles! Go me! Seriously, I’m imagining a little cheering section right now going, “Yay Hester Yay!” That means that I have less than half a dozen projects physically on the needles at this point. There’s more than that to work on in my project page, but several of those aren’t on the needles and need to be totally ripped out and restarted.

I’m still not 100% sold on these socks. I think that they’re very warm and cozy and will be great for the winter. But in the end, I’m not sure how much I like this project, and I’m not sure how much I like this yarn being paired with it. The cable on the side is okay, but the truth is the socks are a little plain, a little vanilla for me. However, it’s always nice to have a pair of plain and comfortable socks. I think that they are really good mens socks - plain, but with a dash of something to keep from getting too bored. I might like them better if the yarn I had used was a bit plainer to make the cable pop more. But in, the end, the socks are done, they fit beautifully, and I can cross yet another project off of my to-do list. Is there really anything better than that? I finished this while watching a couple of great movies - The Social Network and Meek’s Cutoff - and a few meh movies - The Hangover 2 and, currently, The Changeling. I don’t much care for The Changeling - I’m finding it slow and tedious and boring and I’d love to just turn it off…but it’s making me happy to watch it because it’s been in my to-watch movie pile forever. As I pare down the projects, I hope I can pare down that stack too!