Mosaic 1

By the time I finished doing the three pairs of socks out of mosaic 2, I realized that I had skipped mosaic 1. For the first pair I went back to the pink and red knitpicks, and begun. I decided to experiment with the stripes across the bottom. I figured out about how many rows, on average, the mosaic knitting actually had in comparison to how many it ‘should’, and from that determined that if I didn’t go across the bottom of the foot for every other pink row, I should get a flat sock. It worked!

I decided to do a rainbow pair (knitpicks again, sparkly stroll and chroma) and see if I couldn’t figure out those decreases after the heel. Instead of doing them every other row, I went with every fourth row, and that seemed to work well. It ends up making the decreases cover more length of the foot than they normally would, but it worked. In future versions of this I decided to decrease the length of the heel flap (I typically use quite a long heel flap anyway) to help accommodate this.

This rainbow pair was the pair where I learned that, if I wanted the stiches inside the boxes to pop, I needed to purl the second row of them. So, just for the stitch inside that box, on the second color row, I purl that stitch instead of knitting it. The pink and red socks have it knitted, and it just doesn’t pop nearly as much.

Mosaic 2: Herringbone

This project officially starts with mosaic 2, as mosaic 1 is hidden in the detailed instructions on how to do mosaic knitting. These instructions are very good, and cover the fundamentals of the mechanics of mosaic knitting as well as how to read mosaic knitting charts. Hidden therein is a sample pattern to discuss, and well, being the type of person not to read instructions, I initially missed it. So we start with mosaic 2, the herringbone.

For my first sock of this project, I picked green and yellow knitpicks sock yarn. This color combination will return-it certainly has high contrast, though I’m not sure it’s my favorite.

This being my first time turning a mosaic into a sock, I was still trying to figure out to do between the heel and toe. I opted for stripes across the bottom, however one of the things with mosaic knitting is that the pattern area isn’t as tall as regular knitting would be, so the bottom of this sock is longer than the top. That’s what’s causing the ruffling in the picture.

I knew I could improve on this. For the second pair, I picked two more colors of knitpicks sock yarn, and this time I made the bottom striped, but every other row instead of knitting I knit one and then slipped the next, exactly as I do for the heel flap. The end result is a nice cushy, thick, reinforced bottom to the sock, which will be a nightmare to darn once it gets a hole. Hopefully it will take longer to get a hole in the first place? Not content to simply do a repeat and change the bottom of the sock, I also decided to make the herringbone zig-zag across the top.

For the third version (knitpicks stroll sparkly for the black, and chroma for the rainbow) I went back to the herringbone as written (Well, sort of, the second sock has to have the diagonals going the opposite way! That way they’re symmetric when on the feet!), but experimented with carrying the pattern all the way around the foot. The challenge with this is how to handle the decreases after the heel flap. Sure, I could do a different type of heel, but I like this heel so I’m doing it this way. I decided to make the pattern work everywhere except at the very bottom of the foot, where I did the standard decreases. This time I did two decreases every other row, as I typically do for a sock. With the mosaic this made the length over which the decreases happen really short. The sock fits just fine, but it looks weird. Lesson learned.