Thursday, 2 April 2009

More sock madness

Whilst I was ill I got a bit of a sock fetish going. My Vegetable garden socks only left me wanting more after I had finished them so I cast on for anther pair straight away. For my second set I decided that it was time to start tackling some of my stashed socks yarns and there was one skein in particular that I felt guilty about having ignored. It took me a while to find it but eventually I unearthed the ball of Opal sock yarn that I had bought 2 years ago. It's in a rainbow colourway and when knitted up comes out in fairly broad stripes of blue, pink, yellow, x2 oranges and green. I'd played around with the skein a couple of times trying to find a good pattern to use with it but there's not many patterns created deliberately for socks that have this kind of striping in them. In fact, as far as I can tell, most sock patterns seem to be created for a plain yarn- or one with short colour repeats. I'm not sure why this should be as there is plenty of crazily coloured sock yarn out there. I guess people are just happy to have the colour changes do all the work but I get so bored knitting plain socks nowadays.
So I took it upon myself to do two things. The first was to make a pledge to try out and collect as many sock patterns as possible that would work with crazy sock yarn. So from now on I shall just use a pattern that I like with whatever yarn I like and see how it comes out. Now this may well result in some pretty fugly FO's but I like wearing crazy socks so it won't be a bother to me. I can just giggle about it to myself when no one else is looking.
The second thing I decided was to try designing some socks of my own. Well, when I say design I don't really mean in any kind of professional way. More a sort of 'throw it together' approach. To start me off on this I put my rainbow Opal to work and decided to combine socks with my new all time favourite stitch- Mock Cables.
And lo, the Mock Cable Monsters were born...

Might have gotten a bit carried away with using the Mock Cable stitch...
but I do love how the striped come out with this yarn especially around the heel. There's no faffing around or cutting of yarn to get the stripes arranged into a pleasing manner although it does help that the mock cable is only a four row repeat as it gave me a bit of freedom about when I should insert the heel.
Speaking of which, the heel has got to be one of my favourite parts of these socks. I always use a short row heel and toe when making socks, regardless of the pattern but normally just settle for it being plain with some twisted stitches to make it stronger. In this instance I carried on with the ribbing as well and the combination of that with the twisted stitches worked much better than I could have hoped.I still have the other sock of the pair to make. I'm going to jog the colours on a bit so that the stripes are out of sync with this first one. I figured that it would be almost impossible to get the second one to be the same as the first and that if you are going to make ugly socks then what the hell, why not make them properly ugly? Not point in holding back at this stage.

1 comment:

  1. Those are fantastic! I too, love the way the heel came out. Can't wait to see the pair together!

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