I’m planning a pair of toe-up, striped socks out of Black Stroll, striped with either Stroll Tonal in Summer Blooms or Handpaint in Dolly:

I definitely need opinions on this: I think I prefer dolly but the stripes might be more graphic in the tonal yarn. Which one should I make???

I prefer to make my socks toe-up, and I really, really prefer to make them one-at-a-time on a magic loop. The magic loop is pure personal preference, but the one-at-a-time thing is actually a reasoned bias: I like my sock projects to be as portable as possible, and having two socks on the needle at once can get just fiddly enough to demand more concentration than I want to give my portable projects. I’ll make an exception, like if I’m working from a sock blank, or knitting from both ends of a single ball of yarn, but for these socks, I’ll be juggling 2 balls at once to get the stripes, which means 4 balls if I do the sock two at a time! No thank you!

Now, this preference of mine presents a problem. I am tall, and I want tall socks that come up to my knees. Which means I’ll most likely be knitting until my yarn runs out. The Hand Painted and Tonal stroll both come in 100-gram hanks, for dyelot consistency, which means I’ll only need one hank of the color I choose to stripe with my 2 50-gram balls of black. So here’s my problem: How do I know when I’ve used 50 grams of the pink yarn? How do I know when it’s time to bind off my first sock and start on the second one?

Well, I’ll use my brand-new scale, thank you verymuch! Knit picks now offers a digital scale which I can use to weigh my ball of yarn–when there are 50 grams left, I’ll know it’s time to start the second sock! I’ve been wanting a digital scale for a while for projects like this, and now I can get one without breaking the bank 🙂

Please weigh in on my yarn choices, if you have an opinion; I want to get these socks started as soon as one of the pairs I have on the needles now (you know how THAT goes!) is done!