RIP Tangled Garden, Hello Culture

After a ridiculous amount of consideration, I’ve decided to abandon the Tangled Garden sock pattern.  The sizing wasn’t right and the floats were simply too long for a sock.  My success with the colorful felted bag was the final nail in Tangled Garden’s coffin – it helped me decide that the problem was more with the pattern than with my two-color knitting technique.

I took one final photo before RIPPING this baby out: Buh-bye!

Instead, Pam and I have settled on another stranded colorwork sock, using the same pink and green yarn.  I laboriously reskeined the old yarn so I could give it a bath to straighten out all the kinks.  Then I rewound the skeins into balls again.  I needed a truly fresh start on this project.

We’ve chosen Culture Socks by Elinor Brown.  The stitch pattern is wonderful (floats are not too long!) but the heel and sole sassiness is what sold me (this is Elinor’s photo):

As a bonus, I already had this pattern, since it was a reward for participating in the Socks Revived contest in 2010 (where I entered my Night Gulls pattern).

I’m still uncertain whether I’m knitting the right size.  I went for the middle one, which has 80 stitches at the cast-on edge but decreases to 75 later on in the leg.  I upped my needle size from last time and am using a 2.5 mm (it seems SO BIG!). You can’t tell because of the rolling, but I’m into the culture stitch pattern a few rounds.  We’ll see.  I’m so dubious about whether non-stretchy socks will actually fit and not be all slouchy and yucky.

But I am determined to deliver a pair of satisfactory socks to Pam early in 2011!

Cerisara update later this weekend (by the way, it’s pronounced “Sarah Sarah”).