In Which the Pirate Has New Socks.

It’s another rainy day here in northern Virginia, and possibly the last day that it will be cool enough for handknit socks, so I’m taking advantage of the weather to wear my new pink knee socks!

This yarn (ONline Supersocke 100 Sierra Effekt, colourway 584 Pinks) came from someone at knit night who was destashing. She had four 100g balls of it, and tried to convince me to take them all, but I thought two would be more than enough for a pair of knee socks. I used just about 160 grams of yarn for both, so there’s enough left over in case I want to make matching pink armwarmers.

To avoid second sock syndrome, I knit the socks in parallel, rather than sequentially. It feels like they went much faster that way! The pair took two and a half months from start to finish, which is a good pace for me – especially for knee socks! I started the first one while we watched the Super Bowl, and the second one on a train ride, and then I swapped off working on them to keep them fairly even with each other. This came in handy when I was doing the increases and ribbing, as I could be sure to start at exactly the same point in the striping sequence.

I began with a figure-eight cast on and increased to 64 stitches. As I worked my way up the foot, I started thinking about what heel to use – and then I remembered! I’d bought the instructions for the Fish Lips Kiss Heel and hadn’t tried it yet! So I made my foot template, found my ankle bone, followed along with the photo tutorial, and voila! Well-fitting socks. (It’s pretty difficult to take pictures of one’s own feet.)

When I had knit as far as my calf muscle, I started to do some math for the increases. I measured my leg at 9″ from the floor, then 10″, 11″, and so on, and multiplied the measurement by my stitches per inch gauge. Ultimately I increased four stitches every other round until I had 96 stitches on the needles. When I got past the widest part of my calf, I switched to a 2×2 ribbing and kept going that way until the socks were tall enough.

In other news, I have my first baby pepper! As soon as it stops raining, I can move these plants (there are twenty of them) to their summer home of three-gallon pots on the back deck. I hadn’t planned for twenty pepper plants, but here they are, and so now I’m planning for lots of pepper jam, salsa, hot sauce, relish, chili powder, pickled peppers…