September 2026
Sock Squad 2026
September · Pink
Quartz Sky
A Guide to Hue, History, and Handmade Socks
This Month’s Shade
September's color catches that exact moment when a Montana sky is soft at the edges: Quartz Sky.
It's the pink you get right at sunrise or just after sunset, when the light hits the mountains and everything goes a little rosy and translucent, like looking through a piece of rose quartz held up to the sun. Not a loud, candy pink. Something cooler and more mineral than that, with a glow underneath it rather than on top of it.
That's the feeling we were chasing with Quartz Sky. A pink that is calm and a little luminous rather than sweet, the kind of color that feels at home in September, when summer's brightness starts easing into something softer.
In your subscription this month, you’ll find:
Full Skein: Quartz Sky, a cool, glowing pink with tonal depth
Mini Skein: A monochromatic coordinating 20g mini thoughtfully chosen to complement and highlight the full skein
About the Base
Base: Rocky Mountain Purls
Fiber Content: 80% Superwash Bluefaced Leicester Wool / 20% Nylon
Yardage: 400 yards/100g · Mini: 80 yards/20g
Why This Base
Rocky Mountain Purls was built for exactly this shade of pink. Bluefaced Leicester has that long staple length that gives the yarn a natural sheen and a slightly silky hand, and for a cool, glowing pink like Quartz Sky, that sheen does a lot of the work. It lets the color catch the light the way an actual sky does, soft in the shadows, a little brighter where the light hits instead of sitting there as one flat wash of pink.
The 20% nylon keeps it sturdy enough for actual sock wear without dulling any of that BFL glow. It's the same base that carried June's Wild Violet so well!
The Story Behind Pink
The anecdote that fits Quartz Sky best is Mountbatten pink. In 1940, aboard the HMS Kelly, a British naval officer noticed that a civilian ship painted in a dull, pinkish-gray hue seemed to vanish at dawn and dusk, exactly the hours German U-boats and aircraft were most likely to attack. He had his destroyers repainted in the same grayish pink, and it caught on across parts of the Royal Navy for a couple of years before official camouflage testing moved everyone toward gray-and-blue patterns instead. Whether or not the color actually saved any ships is unproven, but sailors at the time were convinced enough that a few retellings of near-misses under fire kept the legend alive for decades.
It's a fitting bit of history for a colorway named after a sky, that same window of light where pink is at its most fleeting and most easily missed if you're not looking for it.
Pink's broader reputation has swung just as much. It traces it from a color considered too "decided and strong" for girls in the nineteenth century (blue was seen as the delicate one) to its total reversal by the mid-twentieth century, plus stops along the way through Schiaparelli's "Shocking" pink, famously described by the designer herself as vivid and impossible, and the poison-bright fluorescent pink of 1970s punk.
Andy Warhol. Marilyn Monroe. 1967
A Few Things Worth Knowing About Pink
- The word "pink" wasn't used for the color until the late 1600s before that, "pink" referred to a yellow-based pigment, not a color at all
- The name likely comes from the flower Dianthus plumarius ("the pink"), whose ragged petal edges are also where "pinking shears" get their name
- Madame de Pompadour, mistress to King Louis XV, helped make bright pink Sèvres porcelain fashionable in 18th-century France
- In 1979, Seattle naval prison officers painted a cell a specific bubblegum shade (later dubbed Baker-Miller pink) after noticing it seemed to calm and even weaken aggressive inmates
- The "pink tax" is the well-documented pattern where pink or women's-marketed versions of everyday products get priced higher than nearly identical blue or men's versions
Info and facts from by The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair
This Month’s Creative Direction
How Pink Lives on the Needles
Our Inspiration For This Months Pink:
Quartz Sky was designed to feel glowing rather than sweet, a pink with some cool undertone to it, so it reads as elegant!
It shines in:
- Simple socks lets the tonal shift in the pink be the whole story
- Textured/cable socks shadow and depth against a soft color
- Colorwork socks pairs beautifully with the mini for a two-tone contrast
The coordinating mini adds monochromatic depth for cuffs, heels, and toes or a little contrast colorwork if you're feeling it.
Project Ideas for Your Sock Squad Yarn
Simple Socks
Rye Sock by Tin Can Knits
Textured/Cable Socks
Cider House Socks by Summer Lee (Perfect for the high contrast mini pack!)
Colorwork Socks Socks
Under The Quilt Socks by Stone Knits
High Contrast Mini Skein Pack Pre-Order
Thank you for being part of Sock Squad and for bringing each month’s color to life through your stitches. We can’t wait to see what you create with Quartz Sky.
Share your finished socks with #FDFSockSquad on Instagram or in Discord 🤍