Better late than never

With the move and everything associated with the move (still trying to sell the old house, doing all the flooring work on the new house, etc.), I’ve just been unable to focus on much in the way of knitting. The Mystery Stole is still stagnating about halfway through clue 2, even though Melanie just released clue 6, and I haven’t touched any of my unfinished projects in ages. But the deadline for Sockapalooza 4 suddenly was staring me in the face and I knew I couldn’t let my sock pal down. I’ve been grabbing time here and there over the past few weeks to work on these socks. It doesn’t help I ended up ripping out the first one twice before I figured out the modifications I needed to make to the pattern that would make me happy with the final result.

So here they are – my Sockapalooza socks. The pattern is a modified version of the Dunes of Tinfou socks, and I used a lovely burgundy sock yarn from Opal.

Here’s a close-up of the lace design. I like these socks because they almost look cabled, and you almost don’t even see that they are lace until they’re on the foot and the design spreads out enough to let the pattern be visible.

Now for the modifications. I like my sock patterns to be symmetrical, especially when it’s a lace pattern. This pattern includes a six-stitch lace motif repeat – but the pattern itself calls for 62 stitches around (so 10 repeats of the motif, plus these two extra random stitches!). I tried to just follow the directions and pretend it was turning out just fine, I really did, but by the time I got to the point where I was going to turn the heel, I just couldn’t stand it anymore. I assume the designer added those extra stitches to avoid having to swap stitches back and forth between the beginning and end of each row, but those extra stitches were (to me) very obvious, and I just didn’t like the effect. It left one repeat of the pattern looking very much out of synch with all the rest. So I finally ripped out the whole thing and started over, using only 60 stitches in a round, and just worked out the begin/end stitch swap in my head. I’ve done it before in other patterns (the Cablenet socks being the most recent example) where I wanted to keep the pattern consistent all the way around the sock and not have a visible ‘start’ and ‘end’ in something that should be a complete circle. It can be a bit fiddly sometimes, but if you’re like me and want your socks to look ‘just so’, it’s worth it.

Anyway, the socks are finally done, so first thing tomorrow morning I will pack them up with a few goodies (this means I have to swing by my LYS. Gee. Darn) and ship them off to my very patient sock pal (who I emailed earlier this week so she doesn’t worry she’s been forgotten!).