This summer there is no Tour-de-Sock, so clearly I needed to go in search of another sock knitting extravaganza. Socks on Vacay is a very different beast, with a lot more whimsy (at least in the determination of prizes, and really, what else matters? Prizes!). You use yarn from Knitted Wit, knit a sock pattern by Shannon Squire, and post the results on Instagram. I still need to worry about that last step, as I don’t yet have an instagram… My local yarn store is also getting in on the fun, and offering prizes for people, so how could I not support a sock knitting event and my local yarn store?
Knitted Wit is doing a range of national parks yarns this summer, which happens to be the only yarn my store carries from Knitted Wit. If you buy four skeins of the national parks yarns, you get a patch, and if you buy 16, you get an enamel pin. This is my first skein of national park themed yarn, and the park in question is the Virgin Islands.
I picked out a pattern that was an anklet, for two reasons. First, this way I can really use up the entire skein, with next to no leftovers, so long as I don’t try to make pairs for giant size 13 men’s feet or some such. Second, if there might be a prize for the most number of socks, well, these require less knitting for more socks! I knit the smaller pair first, and they are really much to small for me! There’s one picture of me trying to cram my foot into one, and I could only barely get it on. However, I noticed that it fit my lower ankle just fine, before I got to the foot bit. The second pair I made just a bit smaller than my size, and they fit well. I tried to follow the pattern for the first sock, but, well, I started making modifications at the start of the heel flap. Just minor ones! The finished socks still look the same, and really are very similar-I could probably tell looking really closely that they weren’t exactly following the pattern, but I’d have to have a correct and incorrect one in my hands to see any differences. Except in the toe, which I took longer to decrease, and that you might be able to see just based on pictures.
As I was reluctant to actually buy someone else’s pattern (Tour-de-Sock was my first time following sock patterns…), there will be quite a few in this pattern for this project… especially now that I know it well enough that I don’t need to carry it around with me. Expect more discussion on how I modified it…