blue/teal/pink handspun socks

I talked about making this yarn before, as well as the first pair of socks from it (the ones with diamonds made from traveling stitches). I managed to get another four pairs (five in total), using every last scrap (plus a bit of an additional skein). The second pair had cuffs, heel and toe in the contrasting grey, in an effort to use up all of the remaining grey yarn (I hate wasting my handspun!). Since I wasn’t sure how much I had, I started with the colorful yarn and a provisional cast on, knit the whole sock and then came back to do the grey ribbing at the top. I ended up with less than a foot after I finished casting off both cuffs! The third pair was a variation on the second, but all in the blue yarn. Unfortunately I don’t seem to have taken finished pictures of this pair, and they’re now at my mums…. I was super pleased at how well I got the colors to match on this pair! At this point I decided it was time for a mindless pair, so I knit a plain pair (ribbing along the whole cuff, plain knitting for the foot). The colors don’t match well, but I know that the two socks came from the same roving, and that’s what counts right? I wasn’t expecting to have any yarn left over, but I still had some. Since I really don’t like wasting my handspun, I decided to do a pair of short, small socks. I ended up needing to use a bit of my next handspun skein (I lost at yarn chicken…), but it blends in fairly well

The grey is a blend of 40% aplaca (named Serious), 40% shetland wool (sheep’s name is Treysa), and 20% black nylon, while the colorful is a commercially prepared merino roving that my mum dyed.

diamond traveling stitch socks

I was so excited to play with my handspun, and here are the first set of socks! I wasn’t sure how much a pattern would show up in this yarn, given the effect that cabling multiple colors together produces. I think these diamonds (made by little 1x1 stitch cables) worked well. I was also surprised to find that I think this yarn is a thinner weight fingering than normal! I used fewer stitches than I normally use for store bought fingering, expecting the yarn to be thicker (and thus give me fewer stitches per inch), but I think I probably should have used my standard number, as the socks are snug around my ankles.

Since I have four skeins of this mix of colored and grey sock yarn, I decided to knit each sock from a different skein, since the skeins (mostly) go through the same color progression. That way the socks would have similar colors. You can see that the first sock has a bit of blue at the cuff before going into teal, while the second sock just has a really long teal stretch. After the teal though, they both go to light blue, dark blue, and then purple, although the length of each color on the two socks is different, and the second sock goes into the pink after the purple. Even though the colors don’t match perfectly, I’m really happy with the overall effect and honestly that the colors match this much is a bit of a bonus!

His and Hers socks

These are his and hers socks, complete with matching contrasting toe on one sock! The yarn for both of these socks is a ‘fingering’ weight, but his (the green ones) is much thicker, and the combination of thicker yarn and bigger feet meant that I ran out. But I’d already sewn up the toe on the first sock, and I really didn’t want to have to rip out the toe just to redo it in blue so that the two socks matched, so he got one sock with a green toe and one sock with a blue toe. He didn’t seem fully convinced (the asymmetry apparently bothers him more than the toe being a different color), so I promised that when I finished the matching pair I made for myself, I’d put a green toe on the second sock.

The pattern is one I made up, but I’m planning on writing it up, because I’m very happy with how it turned out. I did decreases down the leg, though they’re probably not necessary given that the cables act like ribbing, so I’m planning on writing up the pattern both with and without the decreases. I need to come up with a good name for it though. Since these two pairs were knit in different weight yarns, I actually used the same number of pattern repeats overall, and the same number of stitches, even though his foot/leg are about 1” bigger around than mine. Gauge does make a difference, as much as I’d like to ignore it…

The thicker fingering (mainly green socks) is Forbidden Fiber Co’s Gluttony sock base, colorway Central Park. The sparkly fingering (mainly blue socks, and thinner than the green) is Forbiddn Fiber Co’s pride base, in colorway Frozen. Both yarns were a joy to work with. The gluttony base is super squishy, and I really like teh subtle sparkly of the pride base.

More bee socks

I’m planning on making a few more pairs of these bee socks, because I apparently have lots of friends in my life who either keep bees or just love them. These were a Christmas present for a beekeeper, and I was really pleased with how they turned out! I found this colorwork bee pattern in a book my mum gave me, and right away knew I was going to have to use it on socks.

The dark yarn is from knitpicks, and that perfect golden yellow color is called spicy caramel from ND yarn company.

zig-zag slipped stitch socks

This is the next in the series of ‘let’s try a simple pattern on the cuff and see what happens’. With these socks I slipped one out of every 6 stitches, with the yarn in front, so that if you look very closely you can see a zig-zag pattern of bars vertically along the sock. I keep being amazed at how such a small thing can really change how the yarn looks, and really break up any horizontal striping. I think this one worked really well!

The yarn is a new one for me-it’s from lolodidit. It was quite nice, and overall these socks knit up super quickly! Since the yarn came with a mini skein for the contrasting bits, I wasn’t quite sure how long I would be able to knit the cuff without running out of yarn, so I ended up doing a provisional cast on, knitting the entire sock (minus the cuff), and then coming back to knit the cuffs once I’d finished everything else on both socks. I started the cuffs with 8.5 g, and I have a tiny bit of the contrasting color left, so it all worked out perfectly!

Cabled Great Falls Socks

This pair of socks was made with Knitted Wit’s Great Falls National Park inspired yarn. I decided to do some cables down the cuff to make things a bit more interesting. Too bad that the sock is too long for my foot model.

Thus far this year I have made:

• 65 pairs of socks

• 1 tea cozy

• 6 hats (2 adult, 4 preemie)

• 9 shawls

• 1 sweater

and I’ve spun some yarn. Fairly productive year thus far!

Joshua tree socks

These socks are made out of Knitted Wit’s Joshua tree National Park yarn. They have the same ‘feature’ as several of the other Knitted Wit skeins I used this summer-the yarn changes color over the course of the skein. If it were a gradient yarn, that would be great, but I’m less convinced when it’s just one of the colors dropping out of the mix and becoming white. For Knitted Wit yarns, I’ve taken to knitting the first cuff, cutting the yarn, knitting the whole second sock, and then coming back to the first sock. That way the cuffs typically match (more or less), though it can result in a sharp color change on the first sock. I did that with this pair and with the previous knitted wit socks-the blue and pink on a black background.

For a pattern I did the little diamond outlines again. The two differences this time is that I ended the diamonds at the gusset, rather than continuing them to the toe, and I decreased the number of stitches after the cuff. It was a bit tricky to figure out how exactly to do the decreases without messing up the diamond pattern, but I’m happy with the result. I do like having some decreases or ribbing, as people’s ankles are typically narrower than their legs.

Birch socks

Me: Any preferences on what pattern I use for this new pair of socks for you?
Him: I really like the patterns on the socks I already have.
Me: Yes, but I’ve done those already. Why don’t we do something that isn’t just some sort of cable down the side?
Him: Like what? Just pick any pattern you want.
Me: But not lace
Him: Yes, no lace
Me: Even if it’s just a small detail in a larger cabled motif?
Him: No lace please.
Me: Okay, here’s pictures of socks on Ravelry-pick a design element and we’ll go for that.
Him: This one with the diamonds down the leg looks interesting.

And that is how we ended up with another pair of socks with some sort of cabled something down the side. I did do a twisted stitch rib down the back of the sock, and I hadn’t done straight up diamonds before, so they do count as something different, I suppose. I’m very pleased with how the back of the leg transitions into the heel.

The yarn is ‘Birch’ from Round Mountian Fibers. I really like how their website has pictures of the inspiration for the color along with the yarn. The color isn’t quite solid, which gives it some interest. I’m really pleased with how well the twisted stitches stand out in it.

I just upgraded my phone, so I’m playing around with the ‘portrait mode’ setting. It was having a bit of trouble sometimes determining that I wanted the whole sock, and nothing else, in focus, but I’m fairly pleased with the results. The sun was refusing to shine this morning, and I think that plays into the picture quality as well. While we’re talking about how the pics were taken, I balanced this foot on my balcony railing to get the nice green tree background. I was really worried about it falling off (and thus down the three stories), so I ended up putting both the sock and the little metal baseplate (that allows the foot to stand up) on leashes. Nothing fell, thankfully, and after the photoshoot I tried dropping the foot onto my bed to see how well the leashes would have worked. The foot was fine, but that little metal baseplate would have been lost-it cut right through my attaching bit of yarn. So glad I didn’t find that out the hard way, and I’ll have to come up with something else for next time. Or just not take pictures on windy days.

anklet socks test knit

I did this test knit of some anklet socks-my mum wrote the pattern, and thus naturally asked me to proof it for her. She wrote the pattern for a fine fingering weight border Leister yarn from Seven Sister’s farm, but I’m knitting these in Knitpicks, because that’s what I had on hand.

The heel is a modified fish lips kiss, and even with the modifications I had to yank on it a bit to get it to come up this high. That’s in part because the sock is too small for my model (probably around a size 9 or 10 in women’s? While the socks are around a size 6), but it’s also just the nature of this heel style, that it doesn’t consist of enough fabric to cover that larger heel region. Still, for little short anklets like these it works great!

Nasty Woman socks

I was hoping to get these done in time for them to be part of Socks on Vacay, but ran out of time. That meant that I got to knit one of my own patterns again! This one has the same diagonal/diamond purl lines, which don’t really show up as anything more than a bit of texture. I think the texture looks nice though, so I’m not disappointed. I’m also very pleased with how the yarn pooled, since I wasn’t sure what to expect when it was all skeined up! The colorway is called ‘Nasty Woman’, from Knitted Wit.