What's in a Name?

Once again, we find ourselves with a brand new yarn that is hopelessly, helplessly nameless. You named Honor last year, can I ask you to put on your thinking caps for us again?

"Yarn X" is a 55% superwash merino, 15% nylon and 30% Outlast viscose sock yarn. It has a nice tight twist just like Shepherd Sock, but it's three ply instead of four.


















You're probably wondering "what is this Outlast she speaks of?" That's a fair question. Outlast is this crazy fiber that interacts with your body's microclimate to moderate temperature from being too hot or too cold. It was used by NASA. Ferrari uses it for their race car seats.

We spent a lot of time deciding whether we wanted to go ahead with this yarn or not. At market in January 2010, we gave out about a dozen skeins to a bunch of different designers. They kept coming back to me and asking me when we were releasing it. I hemmed, I hawed. They poked, they prodded. I said let's do it! We're bringing it to market in June along with nine or ten new colors.

The photo you see is dyed in a really pretty color, but we'll be dyeing it in all of our colors, so don't let the one shown here influence you.

Here are the details. Send your entry to contest AT lornaslaces DOT net with the subject line reading "New Sock Yarn Name". We'll narrow the choices down to our three favorites by April 17th. Then we'll email a ballot with the top three to our newsletter subcribers on April 18 and let you vote for the winner. If you don't get our newsletter, you can sign up here. Voting will close at 5:00PM central time on April 22.

In case of multiple entries for the same name, we'll use a number generator to pick the ultimate winner.

You're probably wondering about the prize, aren't you? How about 12 skeins of the new yarn? My theory is that would be enough for the lucky winner to make a pair of socks every month for a year. (If you aren't a sock knitter, don't despair. We'll come up with something else to make your heart sing.)

Please keep in mind that we're not Publisher's Clearinghouse. Contests and giveaways aren't what we do every day. I'm trying to make things as simple and fair as I can. You could probably find a loophole to exploit, but let's try and play nice and just let this all unfold for what it is...fun, fun, fun!