Mosaic 15: Fishes!

This pattern apparently looks like a variety of animals to various people. I see fish, but others see birds. The purple heathered yarn is knitpicks stroll, while the white is cascade heritage. I did the reinforced bottom again.

This time I had the transition between the top of the sock and the bottom happen halfway around. Generally I'll carry the pattern over into the bottom half of the sock, by half a pattern on either side. So, for example, if the pattern has an eight stitch repeat, I'll do an extra four stitches of the pattern on each side. The trick with doing that is that after the heel the white yarn is still at the top of the heel, so when I want to start the pattern (with the white) four stitches earlier, I have to cheat so that I don't have a long float across the back for those four stitches. I could, of course, cut the yarn and restart it in the desired place, but then I'd have more ends to sew in! So I cheat by twisting what would be the long float in with the white stitches, like is done in traditional two color knitting techniques.

Mosaic 14: willow trees on their sides

This is my least favorite pattern to date. I liked it better once someone pointed out that, if rotated, they could be trees. As written though, I am not a fan. I don’t think my color choice really helped matters. In their balls these two colors (both knitpicks stroll) look decent next to each other, but I don't think they play very nicely in the sock itself. I decided to speed through this pair by only doing the mosaic on the cuff, and doing a plain, unpatterned foot. Because of how mosaic knitting patterns work, rotating the pattern is not a trivial thing to do, so I will hurriedly move past this pattern.

Mosaic 13: Aliens flexing their muscles

When I started this pattern I was sick. I did the calculation, and decided I would have plenty of the blue to make another pair with it. Turns out that when I’m sick, my ability to do critical reasoning is impaired, and, well, I ran out of the navy yarn. Turns out Regia no longer makes their stretch yarn. Also, neither my local yarn store or my mom’s has a plain navy yarn. I ended up reorganizing my entire stash, touching every skein, to find a skein of knitpicks stroll in navy. It isn’t quite the same color, and it doesn’t have quite the same feel, but in the mosaic it’s really hard to tell. The two toes do feel different, and look slightly different, but I don’t think you’d notice if you weren’t looking for it. The white yarn is still the cascade heritage sock yarn.

I enjoyed varying the locations of the white stripes on the bottom, and I really like how the uneven striping turned out.

Mosaic 12: Sprig (Barbara’s name) or 'The flowers that bloom in the spring' (my modified version), or men shrugging their shoulders

I was so excited about this pattern that I had to do my modification of it first! I wanted to make the top of the flower a different color from the leaves, which meant that the pattern needed to be changed (green yarn is knitpicks glimmer stroll, pink is knitpicks stroll, and white is cascade heritage sock yarn). I also knitted it from the top to the bottom, instead of bottom up, in order to have the flowers vertical when the sock is worn. I was super pleased with how these ones turned out. I keep meaning to write this one up into an actual pattern, so that others might be able to make them too! I imagine them with each row of flowers being different colors, or even just with a higher contrast flower color. Still, I have a schedule to keep if I’m going to get through all of these patterns, so we continue…

This is the pattern as it is written in the book (blue is Regia stretch sock, white is cascade heritage sock yarn). To me, in this orientation, they look like men shrugging their shoulders. I misjudged the pattern slightly-I thought I could get away with never doing a row of white on the bottom, and so the tops of the socks are longer than the bottom. I’m not thrilled about that, I’d rather have the bottoms longer than the tops, but I think it works. I do really like the pattern.

Mosaic 11: Crosses

As someone who isn’t religious, knitting a pair of socks covered in crosses felt a little odd. The black yarn is Knitpick’s glittery stroll, and the rainbow is West Yorkshire Spinners (WYS) Signature sock yarn. The WYS yarn looks very similar to the Opal, but it has a different shade of blue in it. Both are equally as nice to knit with. I know that a pair of socks I made with a different Opal sock yarn has stood up really well, far beyond all other sock yarns except crazy Zauberball. I don’t know if the rainbow Opal will stand up the same as that Opal from the past. It’s always hard when I’m making so many socks, because I never see how well certain sock yarns wear. The socks typically go to many different homes, to people who wear their socks very differently and with highly varying frequencies. Plus they don’t tell me when the socks start to wear through. So I have very little data on how all these sock yarns wear in comparison to each other. It’s frustrating. I’m forced to pick yarns based on colors, feel and, of course, price, and make guesses based on that as to how long the socks might last. Maybe someone at work has a machine that tests abrasion, and I could put swatches of various sock yarns in that…

Mosaic 9: Crescents

This is another pattern where I made a zig-zag version of the pattern and never knitted it. The colors (colorful is Brew City Yarns’ Premium Draft Sock, Once More With Feeling, and the black is Knitpicks sparkly stroll) I used for this pattern didn’t have as much contrast, so the pattern didn’t stand out as well. I was disappointed, apparently to the extent that I never took a picture of the finished socks.

I wanted to finish this skein, now that I’d started it, and since the mosaic knitting didn’t work really well with it, I decided to try something different, that I’d been wanting to try for forever. I call them my ‘big bird’ socks, because they remind me of Big Bird’s legs. They stretch a lot, and I really like the texture. They were a lot of fun to knit, and a nice rest from all this mosaic knitting. I think the colors worked much better together for these socks than the actual mosaic ones.

Mosaic 8

I found the book. I don’t even remember where it was hiding anymore, but I do remember that the search for it prompted me to actually organize my fiber room, and get all the knitting books together on the shelf. Finding the book allowed me to determine where I had been in the sequence, and that I’d skipped patterns 8 and 9.

These socks are little anklets for two reasons. First, because I keep being told that people like anklets, and second, (and perhaps more importantly) because I was worried about running out of yarn. I finished these with only small scraps left of the yarn, so that worked perfectly.

I was very proud of myself for remembering to purl the second row of the dot in these socks, so it stands out nicely. Previously it always took me a pair of socks with that pattern to remember that lesson.

Mosaic 10: Chain

We now jump ahead. The reason is because I never actually carry the mosaic knitting book with me. Instead, I take pictures of the patterns with my phone, and just carry my phone around instead. But what happens, then, when you misplace your copy of the book? And you don’t have a picture of the next pattern? Why, you call up your mother, who happens to have her own copy of the book, and ask her to send you a few patterns while you go in search of your book. In my vast experience, such events are most likely to occur when moving house. For future, I would recommend taking pictures of the next 10 or so patterns before moving.

So now we’re skipping ahead to pattern 10. The yarn is Panda Silk (52% bamboo, 43% superwash merino, 5% combed silk), and showed up at the same time that the book went missing (a gift from that wonderful mother of mine). The colors are what I had, rather than a purposeful choice. Hopefully someone with the appropriately sized foot will like them. I was pleased that the contrast is high enough that the pattern shows up nicely.

Mosaic 7: Rainbow fish

Another pattern where I was sure that I’d done a zig-zag version! I’ve searched through pictures and my big bag of socks, and find no evidence that I did anything more than plan them. Here you can see what the inside of a mosaic sock looks like (Opal sock yarn, again). The floats are, at the largest, 3 stiches, so not particularly long. Because with mosaic knitting you are only knit with one color at a time, you can see bands where the floats are minimal, and also that the floats come in bands of rainbow then black, then rainbow and so on.

Something I noticed around this time was that the colors stand out more than the patterns, such that a group of these socks made from the same yarn all look very similar, even if the actual mosaic pattern is very different. This helped me decide that it was okay to only do one pair of socks per pattern.

Mosaic 6

I am shocked to find, as I write this, that I only did one pair of this pattern! The reason being that I nicely charted up a zig-zag version of patterns 6 and 7, and apparently I never then knitted them. I will have to do those next, I fear.

Here you can see the torture I put the pattern through on the bottom of the sock (Opal) where I’m doing the decreases. If I were ever to write up these patterns, I’d carefully plan out something to make the bottom of the foot look somewhat decent. As it is, I fudge it. I generally knit straight up to the decreases as if they don't exist, and then on the other side I determine where in the pattern I am and knit away as if nothing happened. Thus I’m at least self-consistent (generally), such that the bottoms of the pair should match. I can’t help feeling though, that with a little bit of planning I could make the bottoms look pretty as well.