Monday, Monday

It’s Monday, and as much as I would like to write a really insightful post about knitting and how, the unraveling, it is like the way time slips away from us, and the knitting is like the way that we make ourselves anew, building one stitch upon another, etc., etc. Unfortunately it is Monday and you all will have to wait until at least Wednesday for something that makes so little sense.

I finished Stephen’s Rib & Cable socks on Saturday. They were dry late last night, and he loves them. When I first bought the yarn for the socks, I thought that it looked mostly brown, with some red and black colors. Now that I have knit the yarn up into socks, I see that the yarn appears to be mostly red with some hints of brown and black. The color, by the way is “Mums.” All in all I’m quite pleased with the yarn, the pattern and the finished product.

Project Stats:

Pattern: Rib & Cable socks from the Fall 2005 IK
Yarn: Brown Sheep Company Wildfoote, in Mums (two skeins)
Needles: Size 1 dpn’s
Mods: modified to fit a man’s foot

The pattern is very good. If you’re modifying this pattern to fit a different foot size, then I recommend calculating the width of the sock for an inch of ease because the cables pull in so much that you need the extra inch to make up for it. The pattern is really a very simple rib and cable pattern (just like the title!) with ten-stitch repeats. That makes it easy to calculate for different sizes. Unfortunately, the size that I calculated to fit Stephen’s foot was not a multiple of ten. I thought about making the sock slightly smaller or larger so that the stitch pattern wouldn’t be wrong. I also thought about going up a needle size. I decided against both of these courses of action for a couple of reasons: I didn’t want to make the socks too big or too small and the number of stitches that would have to be added or subtracted would make a substantial difference in this case, and I didn’t want to go up a needle size because I really thought that the sock yarn was well-suited to size 1 needles. Size 2 would have made a much more open, less compact fabric, and wouldn’t have worn as well in the long run. Instead, I decided to cast on for 76 stitches, and make two of the cables three stitch over three stitch cables, rather than two stitch over two stitch cables. This worked out very well, and the only discernable difference is that the two cables that are three stitch over three stitch produce a more prominent cable than the other two stitch over two stitch cables.

The yarn, as I’ve mentioned before, is a bit splitty. There were places in each skein where the yarn had been plied too loosely and the plies had started to come apart. As a result, I suspect that these socks will wear out quicker than other socks that I have made. In addition, the yarn was not “sproingy” and had an almost hard feel to it. I suspect this is the result of the chemical process which makes the yarn superwash. I like the yarn well enough that I will use it again if I see a color that I really like, but it definitely isn’t my favorite sock yarn. It’s too bad really. I like buying Brown Sheep Company yarn in part because they are an American company and in part because they tend to be very reasonably priced.

I plan to make this pattern again, for myself, in the Koigu yarn that I recently obtained. Not right away though. After I finished up the Rib & Cable Socks I cast on, almost immediately, for Pomatomus in the Socks That Rock (colorway: Sedona) that I bought way back in August. So far it’s going well. I’m loving the yarn, loving the pattern, and am halfway down the foot on my first sock.