Fall Footsies Finally Finished

Okay, we don’t really call socks “footsies” around here, but I succumbed to the alliteration.

I finished these socks a week ago, but daylight savings time and a few rainy days made photography difficult.

As I’ve said before, I really love these socks – but I hate the way the pattern was written.  I may knit another pair for myself, though.  The slanting cable is beguiling.  Half of the cuffs and 3/4 of the feet are stockinette, so they progress more quickly than you might think.

On sock #1, I knit the toe as the pattern indicated – a standard wedge toe.  But it didn’t fit perfectly, so I knit a slightly more rounded toe on sock #2.  See the difference? I decided that it was worth it to fix sock #1.  So I ripped back thusly …and reknit the thing.  I’m glad I did.  I’ve found that if I decrease every other round until I have half as many stitches as I began with and then decrease every round until I have 8 or 10 stitches left, my sock toes fit better.  (so do S1’s.)  But every foot is different!

The last bits of fall are slipping through our fingers here.  I can tell that winter is hastening because of the number of handknit socks in the laundry each week.  Boy 1 is wearing wool socks every chance he gets (which is precisely 4 times per week, as he has 4 pairs that fit now) and he let me know that he needs more socks.  That’s what this is about: I’ll leave you with some shots of a hike the two of us took last weekend.  Fall fun!

Sunday Swatches

I’ve been swatching for the Vodka Gimlet sweater.I knit both of these during an incredibly dull school board hearing a couple of weeks ago. It was a hearing for a proposal to build a new middle school.  Only my knitting stopped me from going to the microphone during Q&A time and asking if any of the 6 or so speakers actually liked their jobs… because their presentations were so lackluster and passionless that I couldn’t imagine they had any interest at all in their various professions.  It was bad.  But… the swatches are pretty, yes?

The yarn is Plucky Knitter Primo Worsted, a 4-ply with tight twist that is 75% merino, 20% cashmere, and 5% nylon.  The colorway is a luscious neutral called “Barely Birch.”  The hand is wonderful… and look at the stitch definition up close, won’t you?One of the swatches is knit with a US7/4.5 mm (the one with the orange loop) and one is with a US6/4.0 mm.  I’m supposed to get 5 st and 7 rows per inch – but I’m being a good knitter and measuring over 4 inches, so I’m looking for 20 stitches and 28 rows.  After washing my swatches:

• On a US7, I get 18 stitches and 28 rows in 4”
• On a US6, I get 19 stitches and 28 rows in 4”

So yes, I’m working on a third swatch on a US5 (3.75mm) and we’ll see if I get gauge.  I might have to go to a US4 (3.5mm).  Which wouldn’t surprise me… I’m a loose knitter.  I probably should have started swatching on a smaller needle.  But who minds swatching with yarn as yummy as Plucky’s?

In other knitting news, I’m chugging through S1’s orange Asymmetrical Cables socks – I’m on the heel flap for sock #2 and I hope to finish them this week.  I’m also knitting another office sock you haven’t seen, so I will try to photograph that this week to share.

Hope you’re enjoying the extra hour of knitting time today!

New sock… Asymmetrical Cables

This sock has been on the needles for a while, but I haven’t worked on it very faithfully.  As I’m coming to the end of sock #1, it’s high time I shared it.  From Ann Budd’s Sock Knitting Master Class, this is Cookie A’s Asymmetrical Cables: I’m very pleased with the way these are coming out.  The cable is attractive in a DNA helix sort of way, and it travels diagonally over half of the 8 repeats.  The motif going down the back of the sock just goes straight down and stops at the heel flap, but the front one twists and continues down the foot.I love this Cascade Heritage yarn (which I’ve worked with before), and this shade of orange (called “cinnamon”) is 100% seasonal and delightful.However, I’m not happy with how the pattern is written.  I’ve never encountered such a needlessly wordy Cookie A pattern before, which makes me wonder if this is the result of a very unusual tech editing style sheet more than Cookie herself.  The pattern spells out EVERYTHING in words and full sentences, which means there is ample opportunity to miss something important amongst the less critical stuff.  The way the cable panel instructions are written is particularly irksome.  The cable panel is a 16-round repeat.  I understand that editors want to save space by formatting like this:

Rnds 6, 8, 10, and 12: blah blah blah
Rnds 7, 9, and 11: blah blah blah

But when it says

Rnd 14: Rep Rnd 4

…I just go crazy.  It wouldn’t take any more space to write out the instructions for round 4, yet that isn’t done.

But the cardinal sin, in my opinion, is that this 16-round repeat is not charted.  The pattern would have taken up less space to print and been far more clear with a visual.  I understand that some knitters are chart-phobic and prefer the written instructions… but in a case like this, I think the editor should err on the side of including both approaches (which is, I believe, the current norm in knitting patterns).

In addition, the travel rounds would have been so much more clearly communicated by saying “perform travel round on rounds 1, 5, 9, and 13 6 more times.” 

All in all, I’m going to be very happy with these socks.  But I would NEVER give this pattern to a newish sock knitter.  It’s a shame that the editing went in the direction that it did, as it might scare away a subset of sock knitters – particularly ones that are using the book as a self-directed master class (this pattern is the first one in the book).

I took a quick look at Ravelry to see if others were encountering this.  Only one other person mentioned it prominently in the project description.  I wonder if it’s a problem for others, as well?

I suppose that I could be the exception with this pattern.  Perhaps it hits most other knitters just fine.  But I’ve knit a LOT of socks, written a lot of different ways, and this one is a big huge outlier.

I’m curious to look more carefully at the rest of the book to see if other patterns are presented similarly.