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October 31, 2021
For this month I wanted to do some colorwork. I was originally planning to do another pattern, but in my perpetual browsing of Ravelry, I stumbled across this design and fell quite smitten.
These are Starry Starry Night Socks, pattern by Suzanne Bryan. The yarn for these socks was Cloudborn Superwash Merino Sock Splash in Baltic Sea (a deep marine blue with a splash of lighter of blues and purples) and Superwash Merino Twist in Oatmeal Heather (a heathered oatmeal). I purchased the yarn before I found the pattern so the matching of the samples to my socks was not entirely intentional, but I like how they look. I also really liked the inversion of colors between socks and decided to replicate that as well. For both socks, the contrasting color was held dominant.
I really enjoyed the materials Suzanne provides for these socks. In addition to the pattern itself, she also has a workshop packet which goes a little more in-depth than the pattern does and includes some additional charts and information. I did reference it from time to time for some clarification and found it to be a good reference for more general things, such as yarn choice and how long its safe to wash before bleeding occurs and swatching (which I did not do but my tension stays relatively consistent so I wasn’t too worried and I’d just start over if it became a problem).
I kept to the pattern pretty closely, only modifying the back leg and shortening my floats for a maximum length of 4 stitches versus 5. The former because I thought I’d prefer some more pattern variation and the latter because I wanted to be sure no toes accidently got caught in a float. I drafted the back leg chart using StitchFiddle and referencing the chart and pattern to know the dimensions and how the pattern repeats. I tried to make the shapes reference those in the chart provided but have them be smaller and a little more dense. I could have probably gone through another round or two of iteration, but I was pretty happy with the chart I landed on and wanted to get the socks started sooner since I knew they would take a longer time to finish.
I decided to knit these one at a time because I felt like that would be easier for me; it’d be easier to keep the patterns and colors straight and avoid twisting and tangling the yarn. I felt comfortable doing so largely because I have found my tension to be pretty consistent between projects and didn’t have much worry about the socks coming out too different. I don’t know what happened other than I was looser knitting my second sock than the first and only noticed when I was blocking them and the second stock was baggy on the blocker. Oh well.
There were some other mistakes but I was able to correct for the more major ones. On the first sock I kept tinking back and restarting the heel turn because my count was off and the heel off center and it took me a while to realize that I dropped a stitch. I also knit a stitch in blue when it should have been in the oatmeal, but it’s hard to see and it doesn’t bother me so I left it. On the second sock I accidentally skipped a row in one of the charts so I had to frog back to just below the cuff to fix it. Other than those things though, these went pretty smoothly.
I’m really happy with how they came out and they’re probably my favorite socks so far. I do prefer the oatmeal on blue sock (left) more than the blue on oatmeal one (right) though. The blue on oatmeal sock fits a bit loose, but I think they’ll be fine. Worst case I’ll just make another pair and match up the ones that are closest in gauge. But I love how they came out and I’m looking forward to wearing them this winter as they seem like they’ll make a great cold weather sock.