Monkeys and the Big Questions

I did a ton of household chores yesterday but somewhere in there, I still found time to knit the better part of sock.  What a great way to spend a day.  Do an icky task, reward me with a little knitting.  Task.  Knitting.  Very good.

There have been very very few yarns where I did not 'see' the project as I was buying the yarn.  Every ounce of sweater yarn still brings forth  the picture that I had on buying it, every scarf yarn (3 skeins of whatever), every single laceweight.  I see the things I wanted them for.  Admittedly, the shawl yarns have pretty flexible pattern thing happening, but each yarn I originally bought for a shawl is still a shawl when I dig through the stash (even where I have enough of a particularly pleasing colour for a sweater) .  

The sock yarn is a little different.  I have always known they would be socks.  I don't think patterns with socks.  I just think socks.  Other than a few delicious hand painted specialty sock yarns, where I now know, that as nice as they are, they don't stand up to what my demands on socks are, none of the sock yarns will ever be anything other than socks. 

When I buy a sock yarn, I buy for colour.  I buy what pleases, so when all of a sudden, I am not enjoying knitting a sock yarn,  I don't quite understand it. It isn't that it is a sock. I always feel like knitting socks, even when I don't feel like knitting anything at all.  

The bag of yarns I found in the WIP basket is nice enough yarn, but it wasn't on my list of things to knit this year because I had fallen completely out of love with it.  The thrill was gone.  This just doesn't happen to me. As nice as these yarns are, they bored me to tears.  So much so, that I worked really hard to ignore them and buried them deep in the dark bottom of the great big basket.  

So when I needed a little something old to knit on to be sensible, I  pulled out these long neglected yarns out.  I felt like knitting a pattern so away I went with the only pattern I have ever really knit successfully, the monkey sock.  It was kind of grand.  

I'm still iffy about the colour of 2 of the yarns but the longer I knit on the first pair, the more that I see it isn't really the yarn at all.  Its that I picture them plain.  These yarns want, nay, need to be a patterned sock.  They desire to be lacy (ish), they crave texture and till now, I wasn't cooperating.

So, having figured this out, I am looking for a couple of nice, easy to knit, but very cooperative sock patterns.  I have a couple in mind.  If they don't work, there are always be monkeys, a whole herd of monkeys.  

That is if monkeys run in herds.  Prides? Flocks? Schools?  Murders?