cwBlog

This may be a personal record. I finished the first sock of the pair yesterday, which means I knit a sock in sock weight yarn in five days.

(I didn't blog about it then because Wednesday is game night and I was off gaming, and because yesterday was just a bit fraught for other reasons previously mentioned. Things are settling down, and the universe is working out its perversity in ways that I'll probably mention here when they're less up in the air.)

Unfortunately, the digital camera is not cooperating at the moment. I am going to blame the batteries, since it's been flashing a low-battery icon at me; but it's probably operator error. Once the batteries are recharged I'll make another attempt at taking a non-blurry photograph that doesn't reveal too much of the clutter surrounding my knitting nest.

So, capsule review time, since the point of this whole exercise was not just to have a sock at the end of it, but to try a new yarn, a new cast-on technique for toe-up socks, and a new heel construction technique. I'll take these one at a time.

The yarn: I am just as pleased with the colors and patterning of the yarn now that it is knit into a sock as I was when I first saw the hank. The choice of colors and the proportion are great, and match the pictures on the site. The yarn was mostly pleasant to work with, though it was unnervingly splitty. One of the things I like about plain socks is that, aside from the toe and heel shaping and the ribbing, I can mostly knit by touch; what I found with this yarn was that that was dangerous, as I could very easily pick up only 2 or 3 of the plies with the right needle, or catch only 2 or 3 strands of the yarn before pulling it through. I think (I hope) I caught this on the following round each time.

I'm currently in the process of rationalizing the acquisition of similar yarns from Knitivity, though that may need to wait until other issues play themselve out. It's not like I'm in danger of running out of stash in the next few weeks months years.

The Turkish cast-on: I don't think I like this as much as Judy Becker's magic toe-up cast-on; it was more fiddly to work, and didn't produce as nice of a toe. Some of that may just be because it's the first time I tried it, so I may try it on a few more socks.

Judy GIbson's reverse flap heel: This, on the other hand, is @#$%ing brilliant. It is my new favorite heel type. I'm going to meditate on it for a while until I completely understand how the numbers work out, and then make a detailed technique blog post on it.

Stay tuned for photos.

The famous socks are done.

One of my absolute favorite parts of the whole process of sock knitting is when you get to the toe part of a top down sock. Because you're reducing the number of stitches every other row or so, it just picks up speed until you're done. The last round of these socks had 16 stitches -- that's a far cry from the 88 I cast on!

I also like how wool is forgiving. In the first sock of the pair, I worked a YO at one point and knit 4 or 5 rounds before I noticed it. I dropped the offending stitch and let it ladder down, and at the time it looked like it would be a tension disaster. I haven't even washed the socks yet, and I can't find the spot. And the second sock - I won't go into all the mistakes I made, but suffice it to say that had I realized how many mistakes I would eventually find, I would have been better off ripping the sock out and starting over from scratch. When you rip out a cable motif and reknit it, you almost invariably have tension problems, because you don't match the tension perfectly; when I reknit the top front center Skabersjö motif on the second sock, the tension was all over the place, but by the time I finished the sock, the tension had evened itself out. When I wash these, I don't expect I'll be able to tell the first sock from the second any longer.

The pattern's going to be available, probably sooner rather than later.... watch this space for more information.