rose garden socks, finished

Well. That was kind of fun. String to socks in less than a week and they turned out looking very whimsical. I'm thinking of a cottage-y garden when I look at them, so I'll call them my rose garden socks. 

I did manage to find the second sock mostly relaxing and remembered the heel and gusset process with a minimal amount of looking things up. That feels like a win. Also using the removable stitch markers to count rows was extremely effective not only to help me keep track, but it introduced the potato chip knitting phenomenon - just one more row til I can place a kitty cat. Silly, but true. 

I mostly like how they fit. I might go down a few more stitches to 60 for the next sock since these at 64 are fine but I suspect they'll grow with wear. I could also go down a needle size but I already have these and there is another solution. I also suspect that using a "normal" sock yarn will change the fabric. This was, even for fingering weight, very thin yarn and it is a blend (acrylic/rayon/polyester) that might not grip on itself a lot. I am looking forward to wearing these in some shoes (rather than flopping around the house in them like I have) and seeing how I like it, if the heel behaves, and if they still fit. 

I am reserving judgement re: am I a sock knitter or not for the moment, but these were really fun. And I am proud that they took me a week and not a month. And I can imagine a few skeins of yarn I already have that would make lovely socks. Not getting ahead of myself here, because how many socks does one person need, but I think I hear my stash calling. 

fair isle flamingo

I'm very proud of myself after this finish because I feel like I learned so much along the way. I've knitted socks with heel flaps before, but I don't think it made much sense to me in terms of "sections" of the sock until this project where I made each section with a different color. Working the contrasting heel flap and figuring out where to pick up the stitches to continue in the pink led to an aha moment for me, which is nice. Also working with three colors and a pattern that looks complicated (but isn't really, shhh!) and turns out looking like this is really rewarding!

The first sock looks very well planned out and super cute with this little toe cap of purple. I wasn't thinking of doing the contrasting heel flap originally, but it turned out really good that I did because the pink didn't go as far as I thought it would on the second sock! But because I did that, I didn't think I'd have enough gray to do both toes completely so I randomly picked a place on the toe to switch colors. 

I kind of wish I had planned my yarn use better so I would have a matching pair - I like the first sock so very much. But I tried and missed, that's ok. The goal was really to use up the leftovers, and that I did. I ran out of pink on the second sock much sooner than I would have guessed, so I just filled in with the purple. Then on the toe I kept knitting with the gray until I ran out, so the toes are also mismatched. But if they are in shoes, who can tell ;) 

Interesting thing about the fair isle band at the top - I knitted a little bit tighter on the second sock since the first was a little loose, and behold I started to see a 'dominant color' effect in the pattern that I didn't have with the looser knit first one. Arne and Carlos insist that there is no such thing as a dominant color, just tension problems, and now I understand what they're saying. Whether there is legitimately dominant color in fair isle knitting or not doesn't matter to me, who am I to say after all, but it was certainly interesting to see the difference I got just from a change in tension. 

They are not as snug as I would prefer them to be, so next time I know to cast on fewer stitches. I was worried I was going to cut off my circulation with the fair isle section if I did anything smaller, but I guess I was wrong! They still work though and will be able to go on over riding breeches which is a plus. I think the socks that have the heel flap and heel gusset like this rather than the afterthought heel I've been doing will also be bigger around the ankle on the natural, so I'll file that lesson away for later use. It makes sense when you think about it, but I just didn't. 

Pretty pleased with the way they turned out even with the mismatched feet. I'm also happy to have used up two of my leftover balls of yarn. Onward to the next stash buster! 

Pattern: Border Socks by Mary Jane Mucklestone (my Ravelry page)
Needle: US 2 and 2.5 (2.75 mm and 3 mm)
Yarn: Baah! La Jolla in 'flamingo pink' and 'grey onyx' and Serendipidye Kings Mountain Sock in 'claret'

cardinal

On the heels (no pun intended) of my fair isle hat, I immediately started a pair of socks. This yarn is the second skein of a pair we bought at the King's Mountain Art Fair. I used the first for Dave's scarf he sports at Stanford games. This second one is now Stanford-themed socks for my dad. Apparently he was jealous of my mom's birthday socks...

For the pattern, I riffed off of a combination of Petty Harbor (which I used for my father-in-law's socks last year) and just a regular afterthought heel pattern. The Petty Harbor told me I could do a pattern down the leg and along only the top of the foot while the afterthought heel was more suited to this thin-striping yarn than the heel flap approach of Petty Harbor would have been. I chose 8x1 ribbing to give it a little bit of interest without being overly complicated. 

The afterthought heel was from another pattern I found, called Crystal Socklet. It works a few full rows around before decreases start, and then those decreases are graduated starting with every fourth row instead of every other row. This approach makes for a deeper heel that I figured would fit a little better on the particular foot I was knitting for. Love how these turned out, hope my dad does too!

Cardinal socks (my Ravelry page)
Pattern: improvised
Yarn: Schafenfreude Fibers Luster Sock
Needle: 1

ankles

I had some leftover Regia in my stash from last year's holiday gifts, and a birthday coming up. It took me a couple of weeks to get going and finish up the first sock, then the second one took only a couple of days. No second sock syndrome here! I can understand now why sock knitting is so popular -- with a simple pattern and awesome yarn like this, it's pretty addicting. 

I knitted these top down with an afterthought heel, and I am pretty pleased that the length I chose made it easy to start a matching mate with very little yarn waste. Serendipity. What didn't end up matching is the heels. I ran out of yarn! No worries though, because I had some light gray in my stash that was a pretty close match for both color and weight. It worked out just fine for the heel on the second sock, and give the pair just enough character. Like my mom whose feet these will be on :).

Ankles socks (my Ravelry page)
Pattern: Afterthought Heel Socks by Laura Linneman, free on Ravelry
Yarn: Schachenmayer Regia Design Line by Arne & Carlos in 'orchard' and Baa! La Jolla in 'grey onyx'
Needle: US 1

more colorful socks

I was crawling up the walls a couple of weeks ago and I wanted an easy, satisfying knitting project to take the edge off. I had some blankets going, one of which was a pretty easy pattern, but not the type of satisfying I was looking for since progress in inches was slow to see. Recalling the happiness I've derived from little projects I decided to tackle socks again! 

I picked up the rest of my skein of Regia and I've quickly worked my way through the first half of a sock. Now that's what I call satisfying. 

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)