You all know how much I love Koigu, and Black Bunny Fibers and Madeline Tosh.  But there are a lot of good reasons to go with yarns like Lion Brand Sock-Ease.

Thaddeus’ Sister

Thaddeus has only one sister, and she’s quite an amazing woman.

She has a number of amazing talents, but one of them is being able to find a cheap garment or accessory at a TJ Max store or at a thrift store and match it up with something more expensive, to make her entire ensemble look like a million bucks.

That’s kind of how I see matching Sock-Ease with my knitting designs.

Here are some of the benefits I see to using yarns like Sock-Ease:

• Ease of availability – yarn stores, crafts stores and on-line vendors abound for this yarn
• Consistency of color/dyeing – I hardly ever have to worry about dyelot differences
• As Leslie mentioned in comments, washing items made with Sock-Ease is not at all fussy
• When I make garments for babies or nieces (or baby nieces), they have to be machine washable
• Garments (especially socks) are more durable (and I’m hard on socks)
• Sock-Ease is the most inexpensive option for sock  yarn I’ve ever seen
• When used for scarves, hats or socks that I will sell, the cost allows me to sell them cheaper
• Lion Brand Yarns is a family-owned business and has been serving the fiber-crafting community for almost 140 years!

And after all these reasons…if you’re still a yarn snob, you can still check out the “LB Collection” of yarns, which is only available in the NY Lion Brand store or on their web site.

I’d be interested to hear about what others find as good uses for less-expensive yarns.

Blog Contest Results

If you haven’t seen the video of me on Facebook selecting the winners of the two Blog Contest prizes, you can see it here:

The winners were Daniel and Barry (in that order) and prizes have already been put in the mail to them.

Thank you all for participating and especially the comments from lurkers who just wanted to assure me they were still here.

Current Crochet

Here’s the current state of the three Interlocking Crochet Scarves I have on the hook.

Sometimes I hear knitters say that they don’t want to waste their time on making something with cheap yarn, but when the result looks as good as this, I say why pay more than you need to?