Stripey Stairs Socks

I will be the first to admit I'm an adrenaline junkie when it comes to sock knitting;  I like the super complex wacky socks the best.  But, sometimes I am inspired to do something simple.  My friend Carol wanted to learn how to do toe-up magic loop socks so I decided to design a simple sock pattern that would be interesting to look at while still simple enough that it doesn't detract from learning the overall process.  Thus the "Stripey Stairs" sock was born.

The sock is very simple;  the "stair steps" are formed from all knit and purl stitches.  Aside from the necessary increases and decreases for toes and heels, there are no cables, nothing fancy.  So, to spice things up a bit, I decided to take the opportunity to force myself to learn continental knitting.  I've had several people tell me over the years that it's much faster, but it always felt "wrong" when I tried it.  Very, very awkward.  Which is kind of funny since I was a crocheter long before I was a knitter and when crocheting you keep the tension with your left hand like you do in continental knitting.

I won't lie, it took me awhile to get used to.  At first my hand was cramping like crazy and I could only do a row or two before needing to take a break.  I also changed the way I held the yarn significantly from the you-tube videos I watched because frankly that wasn't working for me at all.  Eventually though, I became very comfortable with the knit stitch.  Not so much the purl.  I can do it, but it's a lot more awkward and much more "swooping" is necessary.  I've heard that the trick to that is to twist the stitches and then purl through the back loop to untwist, but I haven't actually tried that yet.  But now, I have "graduated" to the point that whenever I'm doing long rows of knitting I gravitate toward continental, and when I'm not, I stick with my old English method.

The yarn I chose for Stripey Stairs was a Noro Taiyo Sock that I got on clearance when my beloved Madtosh store went out of business.  I had been eyeing the yarn for awhile but never bought because it always felt a little rough to the touch and I'm a sucker for soft yarn.  At half price though I figured I would give it a shot.  I am glad I did because I actually really love the yarn.  It was not as rough when caked up as it was in the original form, and it didn't bother me at all when working with it.  I read some reviews that said it twisted up badly but I did not have that problem.  And I absolutely LOVE the colors.  They remind me of mint chocolate chip ice cream.  I am glad I have enough yarn left to do another pair of socks with them!

You could use any self-striping, gradient or solid yarn with this pattern as well, but if you chose a solid then they wouldn't be Stripey Stairs!

You purchase the Stripey Stairs pattern from Ravelry.

Contra-band Socks

One of my CARTEL friends told me about a yahoo sock knit along group, Six Sox Knitalong, that was looking for design volunteers a couple months back and I contacted the group leader offering to provide a pattern for the group. (Thanks, Angele!)  They were looking for intermediate to advanced patterns so I jumped in the deep end and gave them the most complicated pattern I have come written to date, the Contra-band sock.  To be fair, it's actually a lot harder to explain than it is to actually knit.  Even though two people other than myself had already test knit the socks, the Six Sox test knitters did an amazing job finding errors, making suggestions, and finding places in my instructions that just needed some additional clarification.  Thank you, ladies!

This design was inspired by the idea of enclosing stripes your "standard" stripes in contrasting bands (aka contra-bands) for cool visual effects and some unusual sock construction.  These just-above the ankle socks are started off with a diagonally striped edging (secured with or without a button!) that is then picked up and knit cuff down with a standard heel flap.  The toes are then worked in diagonal panels that look similar to the cuff edgings and are grafted together.  Depending on the rapidity of striping or variegation in the yarn you select and the cuff widths & number of buttons used, you can get dramatically different looks.

The instructions provide all the techniques necessary for the pattern and there are links to some helpful tutorials as well as a guide for choosing yarns that will work well.  There are two sizes (58 st. womens / 70 st. mens) and several variations for the cuff (one button, two button, no button) and toes (standard, symmetrical contra-band, assymetrical contra-band) as well as suggestions on how to vary the size further.  It's very easy to lengthen / shorten as the main body repeat is only 4 rows long.  

This is actually the second design I've done, though the fourth to "publish".  Each design I do teaches me something about sock design and also seems to teach me about what I need to think about when working on sample socks vs. socks that are made just for wear or gifting.   The biggest lesson I learned with these socks was "Thou shalt not knit sample socks from unknown yarn!"  I absolutely love the way my first sample socks came out.  The variegation was the perfect length for the 58 stitch sock I knit and the colors were super cool.  Even my husband, who is not himself either a sock enthusiast or fiber artist, said they were the coolest socks he'd ever seen and wanted a pair (which ended up being my second sample, more on that in a couple paragraphs).  But the problem was, I have NO IDEA what this yarn IS.  I bought it from a small store in Farmersville, TX at last year's DFW Yarn Crawl.  It was missing a tag.  I remember grabbing a skein from a totally different color way so that the lady at the store could figure out how much to charge me but not knowing at the time that I was going to a) start designing socks or b) want to use this as a sample sock, I didn't think to photograph the tag or write it down.  It was a manufacturer I've never heard of and so can't remember the name of, and I bought the only skein they had in that color way.  Farmersville is a good 2 hr drive from my house so I'm not exactly going to drive out there with my sock in hopes of figuring it out, either.  But it was rather disappointing to realize after photographing my samples that I couldn't put the name of the yarn in the pattern.  

My good friend Debra and I just traded a bunch of yarn (although technically I took a LOT more of hers than she took of mine!) and she gave me a couple of really amazing sock yarns that I can't wait to play with...but I can't use them as pattern sample socks because I don't know exactly what they are.  One was a Jimmy Beans Wool and the other a Miss Babs, but I have decided I need to know more details on the yarns that I photograph for my patterns so that if someone really wants to get my exact look, they can.

Luckily, the second sample I knit was not only an EVEN BETTER yarn for this pattern but also one that I had a tag for as I bought it more recently at the DFW Fiber Fest in April.  Star Wars color ways are super popular now thanks to the recent release of The Force Awakens and as I love black / red / grey together I have been buying it up like candy.  Brazen Stitchery's Duet Sock comes in a lovely Knights of Ren color way, and their "shorty stripe" version works amazing for this pattern.  I can not rave sufficiently about how much I love this yarn.  The colors are so rich they almost look like velvet but the yarn is a sturdy 80% merino / 20% nylon with great stitch definition.  

At the time I am writing this post, I have designed eight socks (not all published yet).  Of all of these, this is one pattern that I know I will knit myself many times and enjoy it every time because of the variety of effects I can get based on the yarn I choose.  As soon as I finished Jason's pair the other night, I really was tempted to start up a third pair (I already have the yarn for it -- it will be my Knit Picks sample in Hawthorne "Arbor Lodge" which is a beautiful grey & pink color way), but since I have several other designs where I've only finished the first sock, I made myself get back to biz-niss.

If you'd like to try the Contra-band sock, it is currently FREE until July 31, 2016, and available only to members of the Six Sox Knitalong yahoo group, so join the group and get your copy.  In August 2016 I will add the pattern to my AnyeDotKnit collection on Ravelry and submit it to Knit Picks as well.

Confessions of a Sock Junkie

Long time no chat!

I've spent so much time knitting that I haven't blogged about it.  2014 and 2015 were very big knitting years for me.  I discovered just how much I love sock knitting.

It's kind of funny actually; before I knitted any socks I didn't understand why people went so crazy for them.  I usually wore plain white, black or brown socks (when not wearing sandals), and socks seemed like such a utilitarian garment, often covered by shoes and pants, so why put the effort into making cool and wacky socks that would barely be seen?

The first pair of socks I made was a birthday gift for my mother.  Cuff down, but two at a time on magic loop.   What a way to start, hmm?

I used a Knit Picks yarn (Telemark) that I ended up not caring for as it was a bit of a rough highland wool.  I started them one year and finished them another, panicking in the middle because I had no idea where in the pattern I was.  But, they did eventually get finished and they actually turned out pretty nice:  http://www.ravelry.com/projects/anyeone/athena

My mom loved them, and swears she still wears them to this day.  Those socks started a tradition of me making my mom birthday socks every year.  But, they also created a monster.

The next socks I made were toe-up two-at-a-time for myself.  I used Knit Picks Chroma Fingering which is a beautiful and soft yarn, but unfortunately as I discovered before too long, felts extremely fast.  I didn't mind too much, because they were still comfortable and no one sees the bottom of your feet anyway - but then one disappeared a few months later.  I ordered another ball of the same yarn in the same color way to knit a replacement.  To my dismay, the texture of this ball was very uneven.  The yarn for the originals was quite evenly wound, but the new one was extremely bumpy and sadly my replacement sock ended up looking like a ribbed condom!  Not exactly what I was hoping for.  Eventually, the original sock turned up - it had been accidentally tossed into the laundry but somehow ended up at the very bottom of a rarely emptied basket, which took six months for anyone to find.  Unfortunately, it had gotten tossed into the wash and came out half its original size!  Oops!

From there my sock production ramped up, and over the course of 2014 & 2015 I probably whipped up over a dozen pairs of socks in-between other projects.

And then over Christmas break 2015 I was hit by a muse, smack across the face - an idea for a sock design.  I spent so much time knitting this pair of socks over the holidays I got a muscle strain and had to take three very long days respite from knitting.  But, eventually I finished and I wrote up the pattern and asked some friends if they wanted to test knit the pattern to help me tweak it, make sure everything was clear.  Because I have great friends and an amazing fiber arts group, I had several volunteers who quickly got to work.  That pattern was the "Lattice Love Socks" that I just published on Ravelry this morning.  http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/lattice-love-socks

But Lattice Love was just the tip of the iceberg.  I have had idea after idea pound into my head like a freight train since then and I quite literally do not have enough time to knit these up as fast as I think up the ideas.  I do wish the ideas would start coming during the daytime instead of keeping me up at night!  But there have been so many ideas I'm dying to try, and so I decided that I will go full steam ahead towards developing enough patterns to fill an e-book of Boredom Busting Socks for all experience levels and attention spans.

The concept behind my patterns is that anyone who knows how to knit stitch and purl stitch should be able to gather any info they need to do one of my patterns from the pattern itself.  So I have a *lot* of background technique instruction that more experienced knitters can ignore.  In addition to saying what yarns I used, I describe the kinds of yarns that work well with the design (plain, variegated, self-striping, contrast etc.) and give instructions wherever possible for changing the length and resizing as needed.  Each pattern will get three ratings:

• Difficulty - is this a good choice for a beginner, or not for the faint at heart?
• Attention Required - is this good knitting for watching TV or stitch'n'bitch, or do you really have to Pay Close Attention Or You Will Ruin Everything?!
• Memorability - Is it repetitious enough that you'll start to "get it" as you go and not have to constantly look at the instructions, or is it constantly different without repeated motifs?

I have two friends test knitting my second pattern "Contra-band Socks" and they are coming out AMAZING!  That pattern is, how shall I put it, rather unusual.  But so much fun!

Then there are the aptly named "Eternity Socks", which were named thusly because the concept for the sock were cables that wrapped around and around the sock, but became more appropriate because it took me about 11 tries to get it right.  Kudos to the Wisdom Yarn folks because my Naked Sock yarn held up amazingly over the massive number of total and partial frogging that I went through before I was happy with the result (and now, I am SUPER happy with the result and ironically can't wait to start knitting another pair!)  I should have named these Zig-Zag socks which also would have worked but might not have cursed me in how long it took to design them!

The Stripey Stairs Socks (in progress) are inspired by one of my friends who wants to learn toe-up two-at-a-time; I wanted an easy pattern for her to learn from but that wasn't boring - and I decided to utilize this for me to teach myself continental knitting!  It was a rocky start but I'm getting better pretty quickly and I am loving the socks.  I love the colors in this yarn, it's a color way of Noro Taiyo sock that looks like mint chocolate chip ice-cream, among other things.

My next adventure in cables I am calling "Anne of Green Cables" (or Anye of Green Cables, but it doesn't have the same ring to it).  It's very different from the Eternity Sock but also based on cables and textures.  I've only just started this one but I am loving the Madeleine Tosh 80-10-10 fingering, it is so luscious and soft.

Last night I had an idea for a very simple color work sock - but I stink at color work!  I am hoping this idea is simple enough that I can pull it off, but I think it will look amazing if someone who is good at color work does it.  I guess technically I don't have to make all my own samples, but I'm still going to give it a try when I get to it on the list!

I am now known as the "sock lady" at my podiatrist's office;  the receptionist has also commissioned me to make some baby booties for her, and though I normally prefer not to take commissions, she's not in a hurry, booties are fast, and lo and behold it gives me an excuse to devise a baby sock pattern for the book!

My husband has been amazingly supportive of my endeavors, and he really, REALLY likes the contra-band socks.  He thinks they are the coolest.  Maybe I will knit him a pair :)

I will try to blog more frequently as I go through this design journey, and talk about techniques and cool concepts as each pattern comes out.

I'm so excited!