1) It came in some beautiful colours and fairly inexpensive. We found it in the basement sale area at Romni, but I've seen this yarn at other yarn stores on sale.
2) One ball is all you need for a pair of socks!
3) It came with a spool of 2-ply thread in the same colour as the sock yarn that you can use to reinforce the toe and heel area.
Ed just wanted to a straight knit sock, nothing fancy. That's ok though, the various flecks of colours in the yarn makes for an interesting look if knit as is. Patterns (i.e cables, lace) look good better with solid coloured yarns. I used the magic loop method, meaning I was knitting two socks at a time. With the magic loop method you are first knitting one side (front side) of the sock on both socks, then the other side (back side). I personally prefer this method over knitting one sock at a time because you don't have to keep count of the number of rows you've knit. The only down side to knitting magic loop that I found (and this one is a huge one) is that if you mess up, you're taking out twice the amount of stitches to fix the mistake! When I do make a mistake I generally transfer the good sock onto a pair of DPNs, then fix the bad sock, the reintroduce the good sock again.
I didn't end up reinforcing the toe area - I actually didn't think of it until I finished the socks. Let's hope that Ed doesn't stand around on her toes all day! LoL :D For the heel area, I just basically knit in the 2-ply thread together with the yarn. In the photo below, the top strand is the 2-ply tread, the bottom strand is the sock yarn.
And here's the finished product! Ed tells me they're nice and warm :) I'm so glad she likes them! She makes a lovely sock model doesn't she? hehe!
