my sweetie pies

nothing about knitting pleases me more than socks. sometimes i am still amazed that something i once thought was impossible now seems so easy. this doesnt mean i do it well, particularly, but i like the fact that i know i can take some wool and some sticks and make a sock without having to carry a notebook or pattern or chart etc around as well. so much so, that i am thinking of taking an innocent ball of koigu and some bits of bamboo in a pencil case on board with me on saturday. (dont tsk tsk me like that. 22 hours in the air and you expect me to not knit?) the point im trying to make however, is that i am confident enough about the numbers of sock knitting that i can just make it up as a go.

i attempted to make one of my christmas presents up as i went, like actually designing my own pattern. i wanted to call them sweetie pie socks, because they were to have pretty purl details and be made out of a red called vatican pie. it didnt quite work, so i ended up resorting to an old favourite, the picot eyelet pattern (ribbon still to come):

i did add a few extras, like a german heel with the two purl stitches at each end of the heel flap rows, and the purling for gusset decreases.

i also did purl decreases on the toe, but i made one serious mistake with these socks, which was gift one of them with an IOU attached, without taking notes about what i did. so i am not entirely confident that they match. i thought i did a french toe on the other one, so i tried it again here, but from memory. i dont think its quite the same. however, i tell myself, this adds to their charm.

and of course, you cant go wrong with socks made from colinette jitterbug in 'vatican pie' which must be one of the most amazing sock yarns, and brilliant colours, ever. i will be at a conference next week a mere 3 hours drive away from the home of colinette, and i am determined to get there. its the same thing as being in rome and having to see st peters yes?

at any rate, i am going to go back to the drawing board on this design. i really like the effect purling can have on plain socks in yarn like the colinette or koigu, with the really tight spin they have. purl details really stand out and make the colours 'pop', as people say. i wanted to have a plain picot edge, no eyelets but a row of purls instead, then a panel of purls down the side of the leg, that matched the purls in the heel.

a very long flight on a very large plane seems the right place to attempt such a thing. i wonder if i can get an upgrade....

k xx