Socks that match... or not

Now, I understand about hand-painted yarn. There is a quality about it that is well "hand" done and it's not supposed to be perfectly consistent as if it were machine made. Kind of like hand-knits aren't like machine knits. And there's not supposed to be color repeats that are exactly the same. Look at these socks:




And a closer look:


These are knit from one ball of yarn. One from the inside of the ball, one from the outside of the ball. I knit sock 1 from the inside of the ball, on the left, first. When I got close to the heel shaping, I set it aside and knit sock 2 from the outside of the ball up to the same point. When I had 5 or 6 inches of sock knit, I had occasion to see them together and #$% &(*&#@.

What's up with this? One ball of yarn. How could this happen? I certainly don't expect to make a matching sock like we can do with some of the self-stripings but shouldn't there be most of the same colors, in roughly the same amounts? These socks don't even look like they were knit from the same colorway let alone the same ball of yarn.

I know I could knit with one strand from each end and change yarn every couple of rows. But what makes me think, after doing one sock that way, that when I get to the center of the ball that I'm not going to find some other surprise colorway? As the yarn came from the ball, I couldn't see this happening. You pull the yarn, you see some brown, some darker brown almost black, occasionally some blue or purply blue, occasionally some light brown/almost tan. This happened with both socks. Then I get this... These socks are going on holder needles into time out while I ponder their future.

Just for good documentation purposes, the yarn is Fleece Artists hand painted sock yarn. It knits nice and feels good on my foot. The needles were Addi 1s 40 inch. My first foray into magic loop and my first toe-ups in a long long time.

The label is not where I thought it was so I can't give the official color name/number. It will surface at some point and I will update...

More later,
Jeri