Pattern: My own
Yarn: Zettl Valbella
I feel like these socks have been on the needles for forever! I started them back in November, and the first one lingered on the needles for a while, but the second seemed to fly off the needles! This was the first time I’d used short rows for socks, and I used shadow wraps for the heels and Priscilla Wild short rows (thanks Leah!) for the toes.
Shadow Wraps
Shadow wraps were fun to work, straight forward, and the wrapped stitches are ridiculously easy to spot. I did blog about this short row heel a few weeks ago, and I still have the same issues with it. Perhaps it’s the position of the short rows in a sock heel, but in order to avoid having large gaps I had to wrap the stitches again on the return row and this leaves a rather large messy ridge on the inside of the sock. It doesn’t bother me too much as it’s on the inside so can’t be seen, and it’s not something that I can feel when I’m wearing the socks but it is quite bulky. Again, I think this is from having to wrap the stitches twice, so perhaps working shadow wraps in their normal way doesn’t create such a pronounced ridge. I’d definitely like to try this method again to see how it works in a project that isn’t socks (Stripe Study Shawl, here I come!).
Priscilla Wild Short Rows
So here’s the thing. I would never knit a short row heel on a top down sock ever again. On a toe up sock, great idea. But top down? No. My usual sock toe involves decreasing until I’m left with 18 stitches to kitchener together. It seems my brain took a holiday when I decided to work a top down short row toe and the fact that there would be 72 stitches to kitchener didn’t occur to me. There’s also a weird little bump either side of the toe which I’m not a fan of. But no matter, I’m telling myself that this was an excellent exercise in short rows!
So, Priscilla Wild short rows. I didn’t find them as much fun to work as shadow wraps, but they are just as easy and straight forward to work with the added benefit of being much neater on the inside of the sock. In fact, the only negative that I can find for this method (aside from them not being as fun!) is that the wrapped stitches are not as easy to spot as they are with shadow wraps so I felt like I had to concentrate a bit more on the return row of these.
Out of the two methods, I’m not quite sure I could say which I prefer. I feel as though the sensible option would be the Priscilla Wild method for the neatness on the reverse side, but there’s something about the shadow wraps that I just seem to enjoy more!
