A Bluestocking Knits

Here are the Hedera socks, from the Spring ’06 Knitty, in all of their lacy spring glory.

I used Rowan 4-Ply Soft in Leafy, a silvery-sage which is possibly the most beautiful green in the world.  The name is curious — it is soft and not-soft, fairly squishy in the ball and yet dense and solid while knitting, very like cotton.  (If I hadn’t known, I would have in fact thought it was cotton.)  There was quite a substantial amount left over, a doughnut’s worth from each skein.

I like the way that the twisted rib continues down from the top ribbing, and then down along the side of the instep.  I liked it so much that I kept twisting that single line down the side of the instep, even though it wasn’t specified in the pattern.  (I can see why Cookie didn’t do it, as it pretty much disappears against the stockinette of the foot, although strangely it is more obvious on the left side of the foot than on the right.)  The original toe felt narrow for my squared-off foot, so I pulled it out and modified the one from Ann Budd’s book — I stopped the foot about 2 1/2 inches short, instead of the 1 1/2 specified in the pattern, and made the decreases every other round, instead of every round, until nearer to the end.  Due to the lace pattern at the top of the foot, I lined up the top edge of the decrease with the edge of the lace section, and so the decrease line is not centered at the sides of the toe, but I’m looking at this as a design element, since it does in fact continue that line that comes down the leg and the instep.

The socks are indeed on the narrow side, even in the larger size.  They felt alarmingly tight when I tried them on for size at the start of the heel flap, but the lace relaxed considerably after a few fittings, and even more after blocking.  The narrowness could possibly be modified by not taking the gusset quite so far along, but as this is only my second pair of socks, I don’t want to commit myself on that just yet!

I’ve also started using the Improved SSK.  I’ve always thought that my SSKs, while an improvement on the PSSO method, to be a little too puffy, and this Improved one seems to work very nicely.

There were some corrections in the pattern, and so if you printed an early version be sure to get the revised one before knitting.  The errors were minor enough to be easily fixable as I went along, but the corrected version will help to avoid a bit of head-scratching.

As a new sock-knitter, I find the numbered-needles method to be very awkward, especially as it uses only four needles (three to hold the stitches and one to work with), instead of five.  I used five down to the heel, then after picking up the gusset stitches I used markers instead of separate needles.

And this is a farewell to Project Spectrum’s April yellows, with our pale cowslip sunroom walls, and hello to May’s green!