New socks! And rainbow socks, doesn't get much better than that!
Pattern: Basic toe up socks with an afterthought heel, pattern improvised.
Yarn: Caterpillargreen MCN sock yarn in Concrete and Tulips colourway.
Ravelry project page here.
These socks have proven to be a fabulous knit. I love everything about them. Look at those socks, they're gorgeous, and then don't let what I'm about to say affect your feelings about them at all. When I first received my skein of Concrete and Tulips in the mail, I was a little underwhelmed. BUT! I was so wrong. I photographed the skein when I got it, see how it looks mainly grey and green with some orange? The lesson here, you can never judge the magic of self striping sock yarn in the skein. It completely transformed into an incredible and perfect rainbow in the knitting. Kind of cool right?
The yarn is soft and lovely and I'd highly recommend it. Working with self striping yarn is super satisfying, but it does carry with it some very specific challenges. Those stripes, those perfectly even stripes are so obviously distorted if the stitch count changes even just the tiniest bit. Really, the only absolutely fool proof method that I can think of to not disturb those perfect stripes is to work the heel in a contrasting colour. But if you don't want contrasting coloured heels, the afterthought heel is a great option. Although, mysteriously, the stripes on my heels don't match exactly, despite my best efforts. I somehow ended up with a few extra rounds of green on the tip of my second heel. I can live with it. For me, the only thing that is keeping these heels from being perfect is the fact that the grey stripe above the heel is double wide. I placed my afterthought heel right in between two stripes (after a green stripe and before the grey stripe) and then I began knitting it with a grey section of yarn, so the grey section is double wide, get it? You might have to look extra close to see it, but next time I think I'll try and place the heel in the middle of a stripe and then start knitting the heel half way through the same coloured section. That plan gets totally thrown out the window though when you take into consideration the fact that sometimes you don't have that much choice about when to start the heel since the whole point is to knit a pair of socks that will fit the recipients feet. So maybe knitting an extra inch would make for lovely stripe sequence, but then your socks won't fit, so... don't do that.
Chris loves his new socks and was a real sport about modelling them for me. I had a great plan to try and get photos of Chris' feet next to Rowan's feet... but Rowan's feet are never still enough to get a photo that is even just a little bit non-blurry. Rowan started walking on his own this week. Up until now he has refused to let go of my hand, which I loved. We would walk up and down the entire street hand in hand. Now he's independent and walking all over the house. Last night as he was pushing himself away from my arms I got a little teary because he's such a big boy. I'm so proud of him, and he's so proud of himself! Which is the really amazing thing. The look on his face when he took his first steps all on his own and realized that he could do it was beautiful. He was beaming. It's the same look he gets around ice cream.
