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.
