October's Other Socks

I promised these socks a post all of their own.



One of SKA's challenges for October was texture. I paired Noro Silk Garden Sock yarn with a Knitty.com pattern - rpm. A pattern that I had printed in March 2007. As Noro yarn is quite different from most other yarns, I wanted to use all the yarn so I converted the pattern to toe up. Once I'd made that decision I wanted to try something different with the toes and heels and not just work standard toes and heels.

I had recently borrowed from the library The Sock Knitter's Workshop by Ewa Jostes and Stephanie van der Linden. (Stephanie is the designer of these, these, these and these.

This book has instructions on many different ways to work toes, heels and other parts of a sock. The one that caught my eye was called Horizontal Toe Band. Basically you make a provisional cast on and knit a small strip of garter stitch, pick up a stitch in every other row down the side of the strip, pick up the cast on edge and then pick up stitches in the rows on the other side. You then increase inside the garter stitches until the toe is the right size and then continue in pattern.

As I wanted to use every centimetre of the yarn I worked these socks two-at-a-time toe-up. Rather than split the ball into two, I worked one sock from the outside of the ball and the other from the inside of the ball of yarn. I was rather surprised at the colours that came out of the centre of the ball but that is another feature of Noro yarns - many different colours in one ball.

To maintain the stripe pattern, I opted for an afterthought heel. I didn't work the standard afterthought heel which is worked the same as toe shaping as I didn't want the ridges either side of the heel. A search of the internet produced a star-type afterthought heel. Having completed it as written (mostly) next time I would work the decreases every 3rd row instead of every other row. The change I made was to the finishing row of the heel. The instructions said to gather the stitches but this thicker yarn would have produced a small hole at the heel, so I kitchenered instead.

When I was running short of yarn, I cut it where the colour change matched the start of the toes and started from that end to work each heel in the colours of the other socks heel. The yarn was still attached to the top of the sock so when I finished the heel, I continued in rib to finish the sock thus using all the yarn.