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!

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.

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.

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.

TDS 2018: Stage 2

The pattern for stage 2 had me learn a new cast on. Both this pattern and the stage 1 pattern had me use a slightly different gusset in doing the decreases after the heel. Here the decreases go down to a point. I might try this with the mosaic socks, doing the pattern on the outside of the decreases and the reinforced stitch on the inside.

I like this pattern, though I'd make some slight changes to it, and probably pick different cables. It worked really well in the blue Holiday Yarns sock yarn I used, as well as the solid green Jaggerspun yarn my mom used. The yarn color isn't right in any of these pictures, unfortunately.

I finished these socks in 11 hours, 14 minutes-4 minutes faster than the stage 1 socks. That earned me 8th place. First place took only 9 hours to knit the same sized socks, which is significantly faster. While I am enjoying TDS, I'm also bummed to have it proven that there are people who can knit much faster than I can.

TDS 2018: Stage 1

Since this whole mosaic sock project started with the Tour-de-sock (TDS) last year (2017), when my mom convinced me to try knitting my first pair of mosaic socks, this year I am participating in the TDS. TDS is a sock knitting race in six stages, that raises money for Doctors Without Boarders. Winners (those who can knit a pair of socks the fastest) get skeins of yarn, plus bragging rights. For each stage a brand new sock pattern is released at a set time, and then everyone can start knitting. When you finish knitting the pair of socks you send pictures to TDS staff and post on Ravelry. They then check that you did do the pattern, and knit at least the required minimum amount.

For the first stage we were told to pick a crazy colored yarn, so I picked out this handpainted watermelon colored knitpicks stroll sock yarn. I'm not sure it did the best job of displaying the pattern though-I kinda wish I'd picked more of a solid color. The pattern is a lace pattern, with diagonal lines of yarnovers. If you squint carefully you can see it

I finished these socks in 11 hours, 18 minutes, and finished in 7th place out of around 600 people.