experimental socks

I think there’s only one thing you can without doubt say about these socks: THEY ARE BLUE. Ahem!

Rather grover-esquely blue. I love them. But that’s not all I love about them!

These were almost pure experimentation. Everything except the toe was totally new to me. The yarn is Colinette Jitterbug in the Blue Parrot colorway. The toes were cast on with my usual turkish cast on, and I used a purl ridge ala Cara to separate it from the foot. And then Tiphanie and I worked on a heel that was new to us, the toe-up heel flap, where the flap is on the sole of the foot, and the heel turn isn’t on the sole, it’s right where the vertical part of the foot begins. Interesting!

I must say this heel fits me very well, and there were no holes or gapping or straining of fabric with this method. WINNER. Will I do this heel again? DEFINITELY!

And then the leg of the sock was done with Wendy’s toe-up feather and fan recipe.

This is gramma’s favorite pattern of all the socks I’ve done so far. Wendy, you’re gramma approved! I liked the look of this very much, but I won’t be doing this again in socks for me simply because 72 stitches really was too big, but 54 couldn’t even be put on. That? Was annoying. Still, I’m glad to have done these once.

It’s safe to say that my calves are not nearly as shapely as Wendy’s, no offense, because the garter edge cuff prescribed in the recipe? Let’s just say there’s a reason why there’s no picture of that. It was like shelves, but you know, in a sock. MMmmmmno. Nononono. So I finally hit on doing a 1×1 rib as a compromise, because I couldn’t decrease at the top and still expect the sock to fit… how annoying. I think I did a pretty good job with these…

Gramma also liked the ruffly effect that my bindoff had, I bound off exactly as Wendy said to do, but right off the 1×1 rib, with a 6.5mm needle. Yes, that big. In every other sock, that gives me a just-right bindoff tension. In these socks, it gave the effect of a loopy ruffle, which I like. So I’ll keep them that way.

I won’t ever knit another pair quite like this, but I likes them muchly. Thank you, everyone, for your inspiration and Tiphanie in particiular, for helping goad me into doing the socks this way.