March sock club

...ary

So I can finally show you March's sock club, as the socks have been handed over to their recipient and he is very happy with his new socks.

Here they are hanging out in their natural environment...
Obviously they were inspired by spillyjane's mittens with pints on, but I charted myself out some pints with a foamy head.. the second row of each pint (top down) is purled to make the head of the pint nice and 3D foamy.

This was my first time using an afterthought heel, which I did using contrasting black and a short row heel. I used the same short rows for the toe too.

When coming up with the plan for these socks in my head I knew that I wanted all the pints to remain in tact through the sock, hence afterthought heel so that no increases and decreases were needed. I also knew that I didn't want pints on the underside of the foot, and I also didn't want to carry the yarn over and thus make a very bulky foot. As you can see I succeeded in these aims, but not until a great deal of googling had been done and a new technique learnt!

The technique I used is called festive knitting, and is a cunning method of working colourwork in the round without having to carry yarns all the way.

The idea is that the first time you encounter your colour you knit it as normal for colourwork, then continue round. When you get to the colourwork section on the next row the yarn will be on the wrong side!!! All you need to do is work across the colourwork section in your background colour and whenever you encounter a contrasting stitch you slip it purlwise. When you reach the end of the colourwork section you flip your work over and do the reverse.. i.e. you slip the background colour stitches and purl the contrast stitches until you get back to the beginning of the section.

Carry on round the round (easy if you are using dpns, if using a circular you'll need to slip all the stitches back over again..) and next time you reach the colourwork the yarn for the contrast colour will be in the right place! Alternate these two rows of knitting normally, and slipping and then purling stitches and your colourwork will build up as normal.

The only differences I found were that my colourwork was a bit tighter working back and forth, so I had to be careful to loosen up a bit, and that when you look at the inside of the sock you can see that where there is colourwork all round the carried yarns alternate down the sock, but in the top of the foot they are paired.

All in all it was a very successful technique, and I may well find myself using it again.

Just to round off, here's a shot of how well the socks fit their new owner!! I was very pleased considering he had no clue of the socks existence until they appeared, completed, before him :)