Thursday, January 13, 2011

identical stripes


There are people who don't mind fraternal twin socks. I'm not one of them. So, in order to make sock 2 an identical twin of sock one I developed a few strategies:

i) to determine a starting point for the first band of patterning wool, unwind to a solid black section of yarn. Unwind the whole length of black, cut exactly half way through the black and begin there. Don't discard the unwound yarn if there's enough for the stripe at the toe.

ii) knit with the patterned yarn about 12-18 rounds ending again with black. Before working any black stitches unwind the whole length of black, cut halfway through the black and end there.

iii) for the second band of patterning wool on the leg, starting with the remaining half length of black from the first band and knit to the black yarn just before the jacquard pattern repeats. As before, unwind the whole length of black, cut halfway through the black and end there.

iv) use the yarn unwound in step (i) for a four round stripe just before the toe decreases. If there isn't enough from that, then unwind enough from the centre of the ball. Do not use yarn from the outside of the ball because it's already at the exact starting point for sock 2.

By starting and stopping the patterning yarn with black, in combination with a dark coloured solid yarn, I was able to change colours by just knitting the two yarns held together for a dozen or more stitches, which saves a lot of weaving in of ends. And by using one repeat of the jacquard pattern from start to finish on each leg, I was able to match the socks without any waste. That works for me!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It certainly does! Those socks are gorgeous!

suse-the-slow-knitta said...

wow, that's thorough, but well worth it