TDS 2018: Stage 6

The final stage! Tour de sock is now over, for this year at least.

The stage 6 socks are Sidetracked Socks by Kirsten Hall. I think they turned out well, albeit way too small for me to fit my feet in! My mom and I both independently chose the same rainbow yarn from West Yorkshire Spinners. I’ve been really happy with it for my mosaic socks, so I figured I’d use it for the last stage since it was a two color stage. When I saw the pattern I did a quick peek through the stash to see if there was anything I had that might show off the pattern better, but I decided to stick with this. The black is just a standard Opal sock yarn.

I finished stage 6 in 6th place, and I finished overall in 5th place, with 628 people knitting at least one pair of socks. I find it really interesting to think about how the scoring is done to get an overall position, in particular what it incentivizes. Each place value is awarded a certain number of predetermined points, which start at 50 points for first place and drop off quickly until you reach 5th place. At sixth place and beyond many people can get the same number of points, such that there isn’t quite as much competitiveness between the lower ranked people. Equally though, it makes it much harder for those people finishing right around 6th place to get the extra points to break into the top batch. So the scoring encourages competitiveness at the very top, and then not for everyone else, to the extent that the person who came in fourth didn’t knit stage 6 and still had more points than me (who came in 5th).

In doing tour de sock I tried lots of things I hadn’t done before, so it was definitely a learning experience. My big takeaway is playing with gusset placement after the heel. There were several different techniques I hadn’t done before that came up in TDS this year, which was a good incentive to actually try new things. I did really enjoy it, though it was certainly disruptive at times to have a pattern come out when I should have been doing something else!

blue stripes

Another pair of mindless socks, albeit with a different heel than I normally use. This is the double riverbed gusset that I learned about in stage 2 of the tour de sock. I'm not quite convinced on how this heel looks off of the foot-the two different bits of the gusset have slightly different angles-but it does seem to fit just fine.

The yarn is das pair, and was way cooler than I'd expected. I bought it thinking it was just a typical self-striping yarn, but it's not! You open up the skein, and there are actually two 50g skeins tied together. They match perfectly, so my two socks match as well, despite there being no repeat of the pattern.

Bow to the crown

So, I always meant to do mosaic 25 again, the way Barbara meant it to be done, namely as crowns. As I was knitting my little aliens though, I kept thinking how I could tweak them, to make them more like aliens, since I started seeing crowns the whole time I was knitting them. So I tweaked the pattern, and came up with this. But then, do I knit two more pairs, one that is mosaic 25 and one that is my tweaked version? I still have 85 more of these patterns to go, so I decided that my tweaked pattern still looks enough like crowns, and I could give it a test knit as crowns instead of as jellyfish.

With plenty of beads in stock and a desire to no longer have lots of little beads in stock, I decided that crowns really need jewels. Plus I wanted to try a different beading method, to see if I was happier with the results than I was for mosaic 23. If you remember, the beads were not at all centered in their little boxes in mosaic 23. It made me grumpy. Perhaps if I had more beading experience I could have foreseen this result, but beading is new to me. So this time, I put all 75 beads on my black yarn before casting on. I expected them to be super obnoxious to deal with, as I knitted the cuff, but they were actually just fine, and haven't caused a single issue. I do have to keep pushing them down the yarn, but they move relatively smoothly, and don't seem to be damaging anything. I also wasn't sure how well they'd stay in their appropriate place once knitted, since they're large enough to be threaded on two strands of yarn, but they seem fairly secure. The first time I came to a little black box-to-be, I'd put a bead on that stitch. When I came by it on the second pass, I purled the stitch, taking care to make sure the bead was on the outside afterwards. I am very pleased with the result.

I'm a bit less pleased with the heel-I did a short heel flap, such that I wouldn't have to fuss with the riverbed gusset. My complaint is that the stitches decrease too quickly-I did them every other row, and I think I would have been better served to only do them every fourth row (i.e., every other black row). These are shorter socks though, for smaller feet, so hopefully they will still fit well enough. They certainly weren't at all uncomfortable when I tried them on before the toe, but the mosaic 25 socks feel much better.

In other news, I've decided to name all the mosaic patterns I create after songs. The christmas tree pattern from earlier is now 'O Tannenbaum', while the two colored flowers (for a total of 3 colored mosaic socks) is now 'The flowers that bloom in the spring', from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado. This pattern, in this orientation, I'm calling 'Bow to the crown', a song by Heather Dale. Upside down I'm thinking of calling it 'octopus's garden', even though it's two legs short.

Mosaic 25: space invaders

I've been looking forward to this pattern for awhile, because it definitely looks like something! Barbara intended it to be crowns, but the first time I saw it I saw jellyfish. I was convinced to call them aliens instead though, as that way I could justify using rainbow colors, and the rainbow just contrasts so nicely with the black! Both yarns are Opal sock yarn.

I played around again with the heel on these, and I really like the fit, at least so far as trying them on to take pictures goes. I think that they feel really comfy though, and I might have to try wearing a pair with this heel on a regular basis and see what I think after that. The heel is a modification on the riverbed gusset. The heel flap consisted of 36 stitches, but I picked up 22 stitches on either side. After turning the heel, my heel flap had 22 stitches. I located the decreases on the two edge stitches from my heel flap. The first set of decreases (one on each side of the foot) I did into the picked up stitches, rather than into the turned heel flap stitches. The second set I did into the turned heel flap stitches, as is typical in a riverbed gusset. I continued alternating these two decrease rounds (with a row of plain knitting in between) 5 times, for a total of 10 decreases. This meant that I had 17 stitches after the decrease, but before the top of the sock. At this point I did a standard riverbed gusset until the two lines of decreases met, getting me back to 36 stitches across the bottom of the foot.

Doing the decreases this way means that my sock will lay flat on the table, and doesn't bunch up at the transition from heel flap to decreases, like I have happen if I just try starting the riverbed gusset higher up on the heel flap. Thus I can use longer heel flaps without having to resort to a second row of decreases-the double riverbed gusset we used on Stage 2. I have a pair of mindless socks I should be finishing soon where I did a double riverbed, and they just look very strange. On a foot they look fine, but I really believe that any form-fitting knitted object should look like the form it is going to fit before it is put on. Otherwise some parts of the knitting have to stretch more, so some of the yarn is under more tension, and, well... I've done research on fibers under tension for long periods of time, and spreading out the tension more evenly is invariably a better answer. I know my socks aren't going to fail first based on their tensile strength (unless someone is using them very strangely), but it still seems better to me to aim to have the sock look like a foot, even when it isn't on a foot. This has been my major reason for being resistant to trying various different types of heels, though I clearly am willing to fuss with where my decreases go after a heel flap!

Another thing I've learned, is that while light colors really need a purl in a little box to make it pop, I can get away with just knitting all my stitches if I'm using a dark color. I've done this on a few other socks, where if it's a light color that only appears for one stitch I will purl on the second pass, but if it's a dark color I simply knit. I do always purl the second stitch if it's a lighter color, ever since Mosaic 1 where I really had to prod the little pink dots to show up at all.

Mosaic 24

There's a contra dance choreographer who, when their partner was out of town, wrote a dance each day they were gone. Sinking all their creativity into the dances themselves, the names of the dances were perhaps stinted of creativity, as they were called number 1, number 2, number 3, and so on. I feel for that choreographer, as sometimes coming up with a name just seems too hard. I didn't get any super helpful suggestions from others either, so I'm going to go with 'Mosaic 24' as a name for this pattern.

I played with the heel some more on this sock, doing the riverbed gusset on the bottom, just like in Mosaic 23 and very similar to TDS 2018: stage 5. I picked up exactly 18 stitches on either side of the heel flap, so that I could start the decreases on either side of the turned heel and have the decreases meet just as the last stitches were decreased. This is the same as I did in Mosaic 23, but for Stage 5 I picked up more stitches along the heel flap than I needed, so the decrease lines start part of the way up the heel flap. The difference between this heel and Mosaic 23's heel is that I decreased twice as quickly on these socks. I think the socks feel nicely snug around my foot, and that the (faster) decreases work just fine. I didn't have any complaints about the decreases on Mosaic 23 either though-I thought the fit of those socks seemed good as well. To be clear, with this pair I did only decrease every other row, as is typical in non-mosaic socks, but because of the nature of mosaic knitting the rows get scrunched together, making the decreases seem more frequent than they do in stage 5, for example. That's why I started with doing them every 4 rows in Mosaic 23. Both seem to work just fine, but my guess is that the slower decreases are probably better for feet with a larger circumference.

The yarns are two different cashmere sock yarns. The purple is Bugga! from the Verdant Gryphon, is 70% superwash merino, 20% cashmere, and 10% nylon, and the color is called 'clown spikes orchid'. It's actually more of a sport weight than a sock weight, but it's knitting up for nice thick, warm mosaic socks. The light blue/grey is the meadow light base from Backyard Fiberworks, 80% merino, 10% nylon, and 10% cashmere, and the color is 'rainwater'. It's a standard fingering weight.

I've determined that you can use two yarns of slightly different thicknesses for mosaic knitting, as long as your careful. I make sure that the thinner yarn is the background color, as in this sock, such that any lines that are only one stitch/row wide will most likely be in the thicker color. This isn't the first pair with mismatched thicknesses-mosaics 19 and 21 also have a thinner light color and a darker contrast color. The one place I really notice the differences in weight is actually the decreases after the heel, where with the birds-eye stitch the light rows aren't as well defined. Other than that I think I completely get away with using different weight yarns.

TDS 2018: Stage 5

The pattern is Flibbertigibbet by Lisa K. Ross. I really enjoyed this pattern-it was much better for my day of traveling than many of the others, as I could actually hold enough of it in my head that I wasn't constantly checking the pattern as I rode on the bus/plane/metro/car, something that I am very grateful for. The cables are pretty, and I like the mix of cables and lace. The scalloped edge at the top was something new for me with socks! I've done lace edging, but normally I'm boring and just do ribbing.

The heel was done with a standard heel flap, but with the slip stitches in the purl rows, rather than the knit rows, which my fingers found way harder to do than they should have been! The decreases after the heel were at the bottom of the sock, in the same way that some of the other TDS socks have been, and that I've been playing with. As far as I can tell, the only downside is that this heel doesn't really want to lay flat on the table, since the line of decreases start somewhere along the heel flap. If I start the decreases right at the edges of the turned heel then the sock will lay flat, but then I either have to make the heel flap precisely the correct length to have the decreases meet in a point (if I want 36 stitches across the bottom of the foot, then I need to pick up exactly 18 stitches along each side of the flap), or do two sets of decreases. The two sets of decreases also looks a bit odd, at least if the second set has more than just a few decreases, as we will see when I post pictures of my current mindless socks. I'm definitely going to continue playing around with decrease placement, and I'm glad to have the various datapoints from the TDS socks.

The yarn I used was Ancient Arts, colorway Reinvent. The fibre content is 49% wool, 35% mohair, 11% nylon, 4% acrylic and 2% silk. It wasn't a particularly stretchy yarn, but it seems to show stitch definition very well. It's also a lighter color in real life.

Mosaic 23: ghosts, turtles, geometrics, oh my!

People can't seem to decide or agree what this pattern looks like. To my knit group it reminded them of ancient greek or roman tile-work. My sister, on the other hand, pointed out some one armed turtles swimming past each other, or some ghosts waving. Another suggestion was owls. 

The blue yarn is Holiday Yarns Mittenacht, in flocksock. It's a beautiful yarn-the same I used for stage 2 of the Tour de sock. Nice and soft and squishy, plus the colors are pretty too. The white is knitpicks stroll glimmer.

I tried several new things on these socks. I decided, since I had extra beads left over after stage 3, to use some of those beads here, just on the cuff in the small boxes. I think next time I'll prestring the beads, so that I can get them fully centered in the boxes. I switched from beads to purling when I moved from cuff to foot-I think that worked well. Another new(ish) thing was the heel-flap stitch. I pulled the bird's eye stitch from the Tour-de-sock stage 1, which is very similar to my standard heel flap stitch, but with an off by one error. I decided to try it again, and I think it looks nice, though I do miss being more easily able to count the number of rows I've worked, as with the normal heel flap where the slipped stitches line up. I decided to turn the heel with the bottom reinforced, and then do the decreases on either side of the bottom of the heel, such that when the decreases meet, then I have the correct number of stitches for the foot. I only decreased in the blue rows, and I probably should have decreased every other row (in both blue and white rows), as the decreases go really far down into the foot. I also could have made a shorter heel flap, which would also have helped with that. The bottom of the foot between the decreases is also in the bird's eye stitch, which ends up looking like stripes. I actually really like that effect-you have to look really closely to see that out of every four stitches one of them is the wrong color for those stripes. I also really like carrying the reinforced bit a bit further into the heel than simply stopping right after turning the heel. I find that on socks I've worn, if the bottom wears near the heel, it is invariably just a bit past where the turning of the heel stops.

Overall I'm very happy with these socks, and I will have to try some of these things again. Particularly the beads. I still have loads of beads left...

TDS 2018: Stage 4

These socks made me try several new things. The new features include: toe up socks, this particular cast on, this heel, including the wrap and turn method of short rows, and stranded color work. The first sock took almost 10 hours to knit, but the second one was much faster because I'd learned so much.

I really like the look of the pattern-the snowflakes are really pretty! Unfortunately, for my foot this heel makes these socks almost impossible to get on, and once on they're still tight along the heel. I really like making long heel flaps, probably to avoid exactly this. I'm also not wild about the cast-off. I used my standard stretchy cast off (no, I can't remember the name), but it wrinkles. I would really love these socks done cuff down with my standard heel. Also, double knit. I think this pattern would work really well as a reversible double knit, with white snowflakes on a blue background on one side, and blue snowflakes on a white background on the other.

This pattern has fairly long floats inside, which reminded me one of the reasons I really like mosaic color work. Mosaic color work is more stretchy mostly because there are way fewer floats, and any floats that there are max out at three stitches. This pattern frequently had floats that were up to 12 stitches, and sometimes they were more like 20 stitches long. I don't remember ever doing color work with such long floats before, so it took me most of the first sock until I was comfortable with knitting this pattern. Interestingly enough, I think my practice with mosaic knitting helped a lot with my tension, because for a first stranded color work project, and one with long floats at that, I'm very pleased with how the tension turned out. I didn't knit them inside out, which is a technique to help with the tension of floats, because that would have slowed me down. I want to try seeing if I can take elements from these socks and modify them to make similar mosaic snowflake socks. I'll be much more constrained in terms of what I can do though, since with the mosaic I can't have as long of floats.

I finished these in about 23.5 hours after the pattern came out, with probably about 18 hours of knitting time. I got ninth place! The blue yarn is cascade heritage sock yarn, and the white is knitpicks stroll glimmer. The designer is birkenwasser, and it's called Arctic Blizzard.

Mosaic 22: pinwheels

This pattern struck me in that the pinwheels all line up on top of each other. With many of the patterns the major design element repeats in more of a brick like fashion, as in mosaic 5, 6, 7, 9, 12, 18, 20, 21, etc., or the pattern has a shadow effect where both colors do the same thing, and I had assumed this one would too. 

The pattern doesn't pop as well with this choice of yarns (dark red is Unplanned Peacock's Twinkle twist in colorway Agate, while the colorful yarn is Unplanned Peacock's Peacock sock in colorway Arthur), but I'm still pleased with how the colors work together. Variegated yarns always present a difficulty in making sure there is enough difference between all the colors of the two different skeins. The biggest issue with these two skeins is that the dark red skein occasionally has lighter red highlights, and that lighter red is in the variegated red/orange/yellow yarn. This makes the pattern unclear in those spots, forcing your eye to figure out the pattern there based on the pattern elsewhere. Luckily humans are good at pattern spotting.

Like in Mosaic 20, I did my decreases after the heel into the patterned portion of the sock, at the boundary between the bottom and the pattern. I feel that this has the advantage that when standing up, none of that boring bottom is showing, and the sock looks entirely patterned, without actually being so. The disadvantage is that each row of pattern starts somewhere else in the pattern-you can't simply start at the 5th stitch in the chart, or whichever. Instead I had to work backwards each row from where the pattern was better established to figure out where I was this time. I suppose I could have marked up a copy of the chart, and that would have worked perfectly well, but I don't typically have a physical chart with me, and it seems like a lot of effort to mark up the picture on my phone constantly.

In other news, in the back of some of these pictures you can spot my newly refurbished knitting bag! About two years ago I designed the pattern for this bag, drew it on my computer, uploaded the design to Spoonflower (where you too can buy the fabric), bought the fabric, and helped my mom to sew it into a bag. In the intervening years the bag has suffered, as the canvas that the sheep were printed on wasn't super durable (Spoonflower doesn't use that fabric anymore, and has what looks to be a much more durable canvas now). So my bag was looking pretty ratty, with all sorts of holes (Luckily the lining was made of ripstop nylon, and that has shown no inclination to wear at all.). Just this past week my mom and I recovered the bag with some brand new fabric-I did the hand sewing around the bottom, and she machine sewed around the top. I'm very excited to have a nice looking bag with bright colors again!

TDS 2018: Stage 3

I just finished my stage 3 TDS socks! The pattern had traveling stitches and beads. My socks are actually a dark blue, though nowhere near as dark as this picture implies! The yarn was mollygirl yarn, Diva, fingering, in the colorway pillows. I really liked the yarn-it worked really well with the beads, and didn't split as I pulled it through the beads using my crochet hook. I picked silvery shiny beads, which match the silver glitter in the yarn, but are large enough to be subtly visible, at least in person.

The pattern worked quite well, and forced me to do a different heel than my traditional heel flap. I don't think this heel flap works as well when knitting on double points. I suppose I could use circulars, but I like my double points and they're what I'm used to, so that's what I used.

I timed myself knitting the first sock, and it took me 7 hours 6 minutes of pure knitting time. Sleep, however, delayed my finishing time, along with work, so in total they took me just shy of 25 hours from initial cast on to final finishing. I think the second sock took me a bit longer than 7 hours, probably more like 8. I did the bulk of my evening knitting tonight at my local knit group, and I forgot to start my stopwatch when I arrived at my local yarn store! So I don't have the exact amount of time the socks took me recorded, though I did write down the time after I finished the first sock. I got 13th place, and my mom got 29th place.