slow going

I feel like I was a knitting speed demon a couple of weeks ago, and it’s all come grinding to a halt. I’ve (yet again!) fallen behind in the mystery sock KAL. I’ve only just started Clue 3, which is the heel, and I’m really enjoying knitting a heel flap again after all the short row heels I’ve been doing lately! I’m a little disappointed in my yarn choice though. It’s not the yarn itself that bothers me, the Zettl Valbella is a fairly decent workhorse yarn, but the colour. Even though the designer said that the pattern might work better in a lighter colour, I chose an inky navy blue, and the more I knit the more I’m disappointed in how the dark colour obscures the pattern detail, and there’s a lot of detail in these socks! More than once I’ve been tempted to frog and restart them in another colour, but the fact that I have no idea what other colour I’d like to see this in, and that it’s taken me a month to get this far stops me every time. I’m hoping that they’ll improve after blocking and wearing them…

There hasn’t been a whole lot of progress on the self patterning socks either. I knit the heel and a couple of inches past it sometime last week, and I’ve only managed a couple of rows here and there since then.

There’s a rather strange ridge on one side of the toe of these, which I think was caused by my provisional cast on being much too loose. These were cast on for cinema knitting, and I didn’t notice the ridge until enjoying a coffee about half an hour before the film (The Descendants) by which time I was in no mood to frog and restart, so I forged on thinking that it might come out after a bit of blocking.

I did a little bit of a test block when I got home and the ridge doesn’t seem to have gone anywhere, but I love seeing how much of a difference blocking can make. The stitches on the foot of the sock were really quite uneven looking because I was using frogged yarn that was still all kinked up, and you can really see how the stitches have smoothed out after a quick block. The sock that I’d frogged only got as far the heel, so the post heel stitches on this sock are nice and smooth again, but I didn’t think that such a small detail could make such a big difference! I have absolutely no intention of frogging this sock again, so I’ll just have chalk it up as a character ridge and hope that a multitude of wears, washes and blocks will even it out over time.

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