Two pears, two pairs

Aren’t these pears adorable?  I should have put something in the field for scale – they are about the size of kiwi fruits.  Pears are coming into full season where I live.  Yum!

Somehow I haven’t reported much on the progress of two pairs of socks, but I finished them both this week.  First off: Orange Vanilla Socks, so named because they are mostly orange but the pattern is “plain vanilla.”  I started these on my way out of town and they made for great knitting while chatting with family. The yarn is Lana Grossa Meilenweit 100 Fantasy, one of those sturdy self-patterning German sock yarns.  I picked this ball up at Hill Country Weavers in Austin, TX, on a visit a few years ago.  These will be happy socks to reach for on cold grey days this winter.  I have a generous 26 g left from my 100 g ball.  I’m actually thinking of making little socks for my dining table chairs, like this:

(I saw those on the Juniper Moon blog.)  We have a hard floor under our dining table, which means lots of scraping chairs.  I put those adhesive chair pads on the legs, but they are always coming off.  So why not try some chair socks? 

I also finished the Jacob Cauchy Socks, which will be perfect with boots: The yarn is a Jacob/nylon blend I got at MDSW earlier this spring.  It is a 2-ply yarn, which meant it was pretty hard on my hands.  I knit it on a 2.25 needle (a little bigger than normal), but it was still painful.  The fabric is dense and I’m sure it will wear like iron, so these are socks for the ages, but I’m not eager to knit another pair out of this particular yarn.

I had to modify the pattern because this yarn is a little thicker than typical sock yarn.  I also made the socks longer than the pattern called for, since I had a very generous cake of yarn.  I didn’t knit the picot cuff the pattern called for, either, and fudged some ribbing instead.  I did the ribbing different on the 2nd sock than the first – can you see the difference in this photo? I learned that decreases disappear better if you put them in the purl columns instead of the knit columns!  (There are 55 stitches at the cast-on edge, and they reduce to 50 after about 4 inches.)

Next I need to turn my attention to a couple of hat projects.  But I’ll return to socks again soon.  Pam has picked a pattern for her socks – more on that later!