living in the woods and making stuff

About a month ago we got this beautiful yarn in at the store. It is super soft, one ply, and machine washable. Generally one ply yarns (where there is only one strand vs several strands twisted together) don’t hold up for socks as well as multi ply yarns, but I still wanted to make a pair of socks out of the yarn. They are more of “treat” socks, meant to be worn specially, and not expected to hold up to lots of wear and tear.

I started the socks with my usual 60 stitches on size 1 1/2 needles. I got a few inches down the leg and realized that this would definitely not fit me! The yarn ended up working up much tighter and smaller than I expected. I ripped the sock out and cast on 72 stitches. I decided that since this was a luxury sock, I could afford to have a little slouch in it.

Just to take it in a little, and to add some vertical integration to all the horizontal striping, I added a cable down the side. The cable is a simple 2 by 2 cable, crossing over every 6 rows, and bordered by 2 stitches of garter stitch on either side. It always seems to take me a while to figure out when I am supposed to be crossing a cable, so I really worked on figuring it out on this project. With success! I realized that if you pull the knitting directly to the right of the cable stitches tight, you can see the threads of each row. So instead of keeping track of how many rows I had knit, I just would pull the knitting, and count up the 6 threads, or rows. Much easier!!

I have been enjoying using the yarn over, or afterthought heel a lot recently. I used it here, switching from one skein of yarn to another. I couldn’t decide which color to use, so I ended up with one colorway for the first sock, and a different colorway for the second. The heels and toes are made with the opposite colors, thus tying the socks together (sort of anyway).

I kept the cable to either side of the heel, in order to have it on the outside of each sock. I really liked how the cable travelled down the sock, so I kept it all the way up to the toe. I did this by decreasing on the inside of the cable, pulling it over from the outside of the foot to the inside, where it ran into the other decrease. It is fun to remember sometimes that the decreases/increases don’t have to be in the exact same spot each time!

And that is it. I have one sock completed, (blocked and all!) and the other at the heel. I am hurrying to finish them, as the days are getting colder, and warm fuzzy socks have an increasingly large appeal…