Last year, 2022, I decided to dye up a yarn advent calendar for the first time. I had immense fun coming up with a theme and then dyeing all the yarn, and somewhere in early September of 2022 I had a finished advent calendar themed off of movies that premiered during that year.

I also had a lot of fun naming all the yarns, which I did by picking words or sentences from that movie. That part was also kind of tricky, because I obviously had not been able to actually see all the movies that came out that year, since I had to start the dye process during the summer. I did manage to find trailers for all of them though, which helped a lot. With one exception: The full skein of yarn I dyed inspired by Avatar: The Way of Water, where the only available trailer was the teaser trailer, which had only one spoken sentence. So most of that sentence became the name of that yarn, there was no other way to do it, as I had already named all the others that way. 

I didn't sell all of the advent calendar yarns, and had some left over after advent and Christmas came and went. So I decided to make a project out of what I had left over, and knit one pair of socks in each colorway I dyed. In other words, I would knit 25 pairs of socks during 2023. Or, actually, make that 31 pairs of socks, because my 17 year old son gave me lots and lots of sock yarn for Christmas as well. There will be A LOT of socks this year, for sure. Haha. 

On January 2nd I got going on the project, and this far I have knit and finished 4 pairs of advent calendar socks + 4 pairs of Christmas gift yarn socks, and I am onto pair no. 5 of both the advent calendar and the Christmas yarns. I'm really quite please with that progress, because seriously - 8 pairs of socks in 7 weeks is not too shabby. It remains to be seen if I can keep up the pace through the whole year though, because I do have a few design projects in the pipeline this year as well. But it's looking good this far! It is a lot of fun, actually, and I do not suffer from second sock syndrome at all. I never have, but if there were to be one time I could possibly get it, it would be now. But no. I'm just enjoying myself and having fun with it. 

I've planned to show one pair of socks per week on Instagram and Facebook, so I'm not going to spoil it by showing all of them here. But I can at least show you the first pair of my 2023 sock bonanza, that I posted last Sunday.

These are the very first colorway of the advent calendar - yes, I am knitting them in the same order they came in the advent calendar - and I used a little over three 20 gram mini skeins of fingering weight yarn for the pair (approx. 65-ish grams total). The colorway is called ‘One hundred percent chance of adventure’ and is inspired by the movie Sonic the hedgehog 2. I decided not to alternate skeins, which in this case resulted in different stripes on the socks, but that's to be expected with hand dyed yarns. I also am not bothered by it at all. 

I am hoping to be able to make another yarn advent calendar this year, and I have an idea for a theme already. It is not going to be movies this year, that has been decided, but I haven't determined completely what it will be. Marine life is an option I'm mentally kicking around, but we'll see.

If you want to see more of the 2023 Sock Bonanza, please follow me on Instagram or Facebook (or why not both?). :-)