I really like this one, even though I only did two of them. I’d forgotten my lesson from mosaic 1 though, where if you want the center dot to pop, you need to purl the second row. As it is, the central light colored dot doesn’t pop too well, but I like it anyway. The rainbow is the Opal sock yarn again. I feel really lucky to have stumbled across that rainbow yarn at Webs, when visiting their shop in person. I’d originally picked it out for my mom, but as soon as I started this project I decided I had to keep it for myself, and get her to send me some black Opal sock yarn! I then proceeded to buy more of it, since it worked so well. For the blue and white (Alpaca Sox and Dye For Me: dancing toes) I decided to try knitting stripes every row. The pattern didn’t compress as much as some of the others, so I thought I might be able to get away with the every row stripes. You can see that the bottom is still longer than the top, though not as much as for the green and yellow herringbone (mosaic 2) socks. I think it worked fine-it looks fine on a foot, and so what if it doesn’t lay perfectly flat? It would if I could be bothered to block it…
Mosaic 4
Another pattern, another three pairs of socks. We’ve got the knitpicks stroll in green and yellow, with stripes on the bottom. Nothing particularly new there, except, of course, the mosaic pattern. We have a knitpicks stroll+chroma rainbow pair, with the pattern going all the way around the foot. This pair was the turning point for me, where I realized that for these socks the heel flap had to be shorter, otherwise the decreases could go on forever! For the third pair (Opal sock yarn, both the black and rainbow), I took the pattern and made it zig-zag. I’d noticed when knitting the first two pairs that, if I wasn't paying attention, I could keep going with those thingys before switching direction. Then I’d have to rip back, and actually change at the right point. I decided with the third pair to do it on purpose, and voila! This was the result.
Mosaic 3
Knitpicks stroll red and pink, with only every third pink stripe actually knitted across the bottom. For the rest, I knit across the top of the sock as usual, and then I turn the sock around and purl that pink back to the start. So for all of these socks the place I change colors is along the right side of the sock (as viewed when you have it on, and are looking down at your foot). So I start from the right side, and knit across the top of the sock until I come to the left side. Then I turn the sock around, and purl back across the top until I come back to the right side. That way I’ve done two rows of pink across the top of the sock, and not knitted anything along the bottom.
I really like this pattern, and at this point I’d figured out three different bottoms, so we got three different pairs from this pattern. The blue and white ones (Blue: Alpaca Sox, White: Dye For Me dancing toes) have the reinforced bottoms (and are super soft and comfy!). The rainbow pair (Knitpicks stroll and chroma) has the pattern going around the foot. You can see that the decreases after the heel take up most of the foot. They seem to fit just fine though.
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.
