The sock as shown on Wikipedia
If you go to the english wikipedia page on socks (at least, if you did so between December of 2010 and the time of writing), the first image is of ‘a hand knitted white sock made out of handspun wool’. I’ve been the proud owner of those socks for many years, and I’m now working on writing up the pattern for them, and knitting a pair of them myself. For my first sample I decided to use some of Jaggerspun’s Mousam Falls sock yarn, in the color Nutmeg, mostly because there was a cone of it near me when I wanted to cast on. In retrospect, I think a lighter yarn works better for these socks, which is super convenient, because I’ll be publishing the pattern in conjunction with the release of Shorn III from Melissa of knittingthestash. This is Melissa’s third time making a limited edition farm skein yarn, and this is how she describes it:
Shorn III is a blend of Corriedale and Corriedale/Teeswater fiber sheared from Cathe Capel’s Seven Sisters Farm in Sidney, IL and spun by Stonehedge Fiber Mill in Michigan. Each skein is 250 yds of 3-ply fingering weight yarn. It is natural, undyed yarn that is an off-white color.
I’m currently working on polishing up the pattern, but it should be available for test knitting soon! I’ve expanded the pattern to include different sizes (instead of just the exact size/sock pictured on Wikipedia), and I’ve added an option for calf shaping, like I did on my recent oatmeal colored traveling stitch socks. The wiki sock is equivalent to a medium size with no calf shaping in my pattern. With those changes, I decided that I needed to test knit a version with calf shaping, so the brown ones below are the small size with 16 stitches worth of calf shaping.
One interesting thing about the pattern is that the back is not symmetrical. On either side of the central back panel, there are two different 6 stitch designs, apparently because mum couldn’t decide which one she liked better when originally making these socks, and decided to simply use both. Even though you can’t see that in the picture on Wikipedia, I decided that I wanted to be true to the original socks, and wrote it up that way. I did make one change though, in the ribbing at the top. Specifically, on the original socks the ribbing does not line up nicely with the main pattern, so I fixed that. I also noticed that the original has a twisted stitch column on either side of the top through the length of the foot, and I decided not to keep that either, mostly for ease of writing the pattern (I can be lazy sometimes…). Other than that though, I did my best to accurately represent the original Wikipedia socks, with added size options.