Socks on Vacay: Sequoia Kings

The next installment of national park yarn, in the same Short Attention Span pattern.

Grumpy sheep was not amused. Not even when I told him that the socks complemented his fleece very nicely! Some sheep are just hard to please.

These are pairs 46 and 47 for this year.

Socks on Vacay: Bryce Canyon

It was requested that I make a big pair of socks from this skein, so to match the big size 13 men’s socks, I made a little pair of socks to match! No yarn left over-I used a very small amount of Grand Teton yarn to finish up the toes on the tiny socks. My total leftovers from the first six skeins of Knitted Wit yarn is less than 5 grams!

Grumpy sheep thinks that the small socks fit him much better than the size of socks I normally make him wear.

This gets me up to 12 pairs of socks on vacay, 43 pairs knit this year, and 603 pairs overall!

Socks on Vacay: Grand Tetons

Another two pairs done! I made both of these pairs the same size, and ended up with about 3 grams left over. I should be able to use it as the tips of toes on some of the future national parks yarns, if I lose at yarn chicken again!

The yarn is Knitted Wit’s Grand Teton National Park inspired sock yarn, and I used Shannon Squire’s Short Attention Span pattern again…

In other news, white sheep now has a hat! Perfect to keep her from getting a sunburn this summer, should she ever go out in the sun…

Socks on Vacay: Great Falls

Another set of socks made from yarn by Knitted Wit, in the Short Attention Span pattern by Shannon Squire. This time I won at yarn chicken!

I’ve now fully adapted the pattern-I typically cast on the number of stitches for the smallest size, but assign more than half of them to the top of the sock, knit a narrow heel flap that’s the longest length specified in the pattern, and decrease down after the heel to either 4 or 8 more stitches than I cast on. I can typically get both a pair that is women’s size 7 and one that’s size 10 out of the same skein.

Socks on Vacay: Wrangell-St. Elias

Another two pairs of socks done! I stuck with Shannon’s pattern Short Attention Span, and the yarn this time is Knitted Wit’s Wrangell-St. Elias National Park yarn. I can’t show you both socks at once, because someone bought the first pair from me before I’d had a chance to finish the second. I stuck with similar pattern modifications as I did with Death Valley-a longer heel flap, an odd number of stitches on the top and bottom of the foot, and fewer stitches on the cuff than for the foot. I lost at yarn chicken on the second pair of socks, and ended up doing the last five rows of both toes in th Virgin Islands yarn. I was going to rip out the toes plus a few rows but everyone at the yarn store told me to just use the second color. Even though the two colors are quite different, it isn’t at all obvious, so I suppose they were right (though I know my mum wouldn’t have given me that advice!).

I borrowed the sock blocker from a friend at the yarn store for these pictures. I think I might need to invest in a pair of my own, because the socks look so nice on them!

Socks on Vacay: Death Valley

My second Knitted Wit skein is Death Valley. I enjoyed the colors on this one, and I find it fascinating how it pools at different numbers of stitches. My cuff pools so that the blues and greens form a stripe, and the pinks and browns form another stripe. In the decreases after the cuff there’s a portion where all the tan lines up, and the brown and green stripe on either side of that with a blue and pink stipe opposite. In the foot the pooling creates a narrow band of repeated stripes, mixing up the colors much more. It is a fun yarn.

I modified the pattern a bit more for these pairs. I found that the smallest cast on fits my ankle just fine, so I cast on with only 54 stitches, but I used 66 on the foot. I used a really narrow heel flap, so that I could have the same number of stitches on either side of the gusset decreases. I also used an odd number of stitches on the heel flap, with the eye of partridge stitch, which is a great combination.

I played yarn chicken again, to get two pairs out of this one skein. I’m getting pretty good at yarn chicken! I had about half as much yarn left after the Death Valley socks than I did after the Virgin Island ones:

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The sheep are enjoying their new socks

These are my 35th and 36th pairs for this year!

Socks on Vacay: Virgin Islands

This summer there is no Tour-de-Sock, so clearly I needed to go in search of another sock knitting extravaganza. Socks on Vacay is a very different beast, with a lot more whimsy (at least in the determination of prizes, and really, what else matters? Prizes!). You use yarn from Knitted Wit, knit a sock pattern by Shannon Squire, and post the results on Instagram. I still need to worry about that last step, as I don’t yet have an instagram… My local yarn store is also getting in on the fun, and offering prizes for people, so how could I not support a sock knitting event and my local yarn store?

Knitted Wit is doing a range of national parks yarns this summer, which happens to be the only yarn my store carries from Knitted Wit. If you buy four skeins of the national parks yarns, you get a patch, and if you buy 16, you get an enamel pin. This is my first skein of national park themed yarn, and the park in question is the Virgin Islands.

I picked out a pattern that was an anklet, for two reasons. First, this way I can really use up the entire skein, with next to no leftovers, so long as I don’t try to make pairs for giant size 13 men’s feet or some such. Second, if there might be a prize for the most number of socks, well, these require less knitting for more socks! I knit the smaller pair first, and they are really much to small for me! There’s one picture of me trying to cram my foot into one, and I could only barely get it on. However, I noticed that it fit my lower ankle just fine, before I got to the foot bit. The second pair I made just a bit smaller than my size, and they fit well. I tried to follow the pattern for the first sock, but, well, I started making modifications at the start of the heel flap. Just minor ones! The finished socks still look the same, and really are very similar-I could probably tell looking really closely that they weren’t exactly following the pattern, but I’d have to have a correct and incorrect one in my hands to see any differences. Except in the toe, which I took longer to decrease, and that you might be able to see just based on pictures.

As I was reluctant to actually buy someone else’s pattern (Tour-de-Sock was my first time following sock patterns…), there will be quite a few in this pattern for this project… especially now that I know it well enough that I don’t need to carry it around with me. Expect more discussion on how I modified it…

Round Mountain Fibers socks

This is my fairly standard cabled clock sock pattern. According to Wikipedia’s sock page:

From the 16th century onwards, an ornamental design on the ankle or side of a sock has been called a clock.

There are three references at the end of the sentence, and I’ve heard the term used in real life, so it must be true! I really like these side cables as a way of adding a bit of interest to the sock, without having to do anything super fancy or complicated. I also can use them on busier yarns that way, like this one. I was a bit worried that any pattern was going to be lost in this yarn, until I saw the way that it pooled.

The yarn is a one of a kind color from Round Mountain Fibers, a 100% superwash merino wool, made in the USA. It feels like it should be really well wearing, and it was a lot of fun to knit with.

Entrelac House Pride

I took the rest of the house pride yarn, and made these! I really wanted to see how the yarn would pool with entrelac-I wanted the bright colors next to each other without the grey. I tried hard to get each square to either be rainbow or grey, and I managed it on the top of the foot. It’s a bit hard to tell in the pictures, but the top of the foot is colorful, and the bottom half is grey. I knit the top half first, then came back and knit the heel, bottom of the foot, and the toe. I was playing yarn chicken, and had just enough yarn left to sew in the ends when I finished…

The colorful yarn is ‘House Pride’ from Bad Wolf Girl Studio, and the grey is ‘Badger Black’ from Holiday Yarns in the flock sock base. I’m really happy that the grey I happened to have on hand matched so perfectly!

I’m off for a conference next week, so don’t expect new updates for awhile…

Purple carrots and a blue sky

This is the rest of the yarn I used for the heels, toes and cuffs on my carrot socks. The two different pairs have very different patterns, but they’re the same Correidale sock yarn base from Once Upon a Corgi. This yarn was fun to play with, and I love the names that the dyer came up with for the colors!

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Decreases in the diamond purl pattern-blank squares are knit stitches, p’s are purls, p2 stands for purl two stitches together, and grey means that the stitch is no longer there.

The purple socks (colorway: Like my cold dead heart) have more of the purl stitch diamonds on them. I made the diamonds really big on these ones, in contrast to the Vocabulary diamonds ones. I think I like both sizes equally well, but the advantage of the large ones is that I was able to put some decreases into the cuff without completely messing up the pattern. I knew I was short on yarn, so I wanted to cut out stitches wherever possible, hence the desire for decreases.

I’m also pleased with how the toe worked, as I did smaller and smaller diamonds right through the toe part up until it was time to kitchener stitch the last stitches together.

The blue socks (colorway: depths below) are a pattern that’s been nagging me to try since I was working on the socks for my sister. I’ve been wanting to see how these cables would stack next to each other, and this yarn was solid enough to actually see the design.

These are pairs 25 and 26 for this year!