Tuesday, September 6, 2016

somewhat dutch

The colorway for this Regia is 'orchard' which I suppose I could see with the colors of apples, oranges, sky, and clouds (perhaps?). When I look at these finished socks though, I just think of Amsterdam when we were there during Queen's Day 2011. Now King's Day with the new monarch, the holiday is celebrated with a riot of bright orange everywhere.

That said, this yarn is very clever. All that complicated looking design work is a result of the way the yarn is dyed along its length. They are 'made' to be for socks, so I'm sure it looks best worked up as a small tube though I'd be curious to see how it turns out with other patterns. Each knitter will have a slightly different gauge and socks are a range of circumferences depending on the wearer, but within error the patterns still shine through with only a little bit of muddiness.


By sheer accident these socks ended up looking very similar in pattern from top to bottom. You may notice the mismatch at the toes, showing that I had a yard or so difference in the 'start' position between the two, but not much. The other difference is the heels. I wasn't going to try to match them so just knit from wherever I broke my yarn. This was an afterthought heel, meaning while knitting merrily along a growing tube of fabric, you get to the part where the heel goes and use waste yarn on half of the stitches so you can come back later, rip those out, and put the heel in. 


The afterthought heel was super easy compared to remembering how to make a more traditional heel flap and picking up stitches to turn the heel etc. I'm sure that gets easier with practice since I've only done it once, but after one go-round of this version I could make a sock this way from memory. 

I'm pleased with this, my second pair of knitted socks and I've got a few more pairs to join this one for holiday gifting. I'll be trying some different patterns for those next few pairs, though I'm sure I'll return to this one as I continue exploring this new genre of knitting. 

Pattern: Afterthought Heel Socks (my Ravelry page)
Yarn: Schachenmayr Regia Design Line by Arne & Carlos in 'Orchard'
Needles: US size 1 DPNs (2.25 mm)

1 comment:

  1. Oh man! I first looked at these and thought, they are so complicated! It's a bit hard to believe that's all in the yarn! :) They're quite lovely.

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