Have you seen the new hand painted colorways of Stroll sock yarn (formerly Essential)?

I had the great pleasure of designing them months ago, and I’ve been awaiting their release eagerly ever since. I had to place an order right away yesterday for the Make Believe color (along with a City Tweed order to make a fall sweater). I plan to collect more of my favorites, like Tree Fort and Playtime over the next few months. I’m not much of a sock knitter, but I just discovered a new small shawl pattern on Ravelry called Ulmus that is perfect for two different skeins of multicolored sock yarn. Time to knit down my impulse buy sock yarn into gorgeous little shawls to wear at the office when the a/c kicks on!

Anyway, many of you might be wondering what the difference is between Stroll Multi and Stroll Hand Painted. Stroll Multi is a space dyed yarn with only three colors; they are dyed by machine, and the colors are evenly spaced. Stroll Hand Painted is just like our Imagination yarn, as each hank is painted individually by hand and can have up to seven different colors. This makes each hank wonderfully unique. Because of the uniqueness of the hanks, Stroll Hand Painted comes in 100 gram hanks, so you don’t have to worry about mis-matched socks. One hank is enough for a pair of socks.

In order to get ready for the web launch, I had to take some glamorous photos myself, since the photography team was working hard this week to get the next catalog out the door. The groundskeeping crew outside our office building probably thought I was nuts, as the photos required laying on my belly in the grass to get the right angle! I put my favorite photo (above) that I didn’t use for our web site as the desktop wallpaper on my computer, and I’ve added it to our wallpaper selection, so you can do the same if you like.

To view all the Stroll options in one place, including the new Stroll Sport, click here. <