Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Zauberball socks

This is the final installment in my Why-Haven't-I-Already-Blogged-This series.


The Zauberball yarn was a big hit at Sock Summit, and as I mentioned previously, I went up to it every day and stroked it and held it and carried it around with me and imagined the fantastic socks it would make, and then put it down. On the last day I finally bought it. There were two colourway possibilities I was choosing between (of the several available) -- one colourway was a rainbow, which is a personal fave of mine, and the other was this one, called Royal. The combo of orange, red, hot pink, plum, and deep violet was intoxicating and in the end I couldn't resist it. I wound it into two contrasting balls by hand, in Portland, and then rewound it with the ball winder when I got home. The contrasting balls were obviously needed for me to make these fantastic stripes, by alternating every two rows.


You can see in the photos that the yarn leaves a fuzzy little halo around the sock. Toasty. The halo is probably because the yarn is only a single ply. Being a single ply is also the reason that the knitting tends to bias. With a simple striped sock, bias isn't a problem, really. If I was making a sweater, I might be frustrated right now.

Details: this is (again) the Universal Toe-Up Sock from Knitty. I used a short-row toe and heel (as usual) and only changed things up at the cuff, where I did a garter stitch, to keep the stripes clean and not get the little breaks in colour you get with purls in ribbing. I bound off with EZ's sewn bind-off, which kept things nice and stretchy. These socks knit up ridiculously fast, on US2s: I had virtually completed the first sock within 24 hours of starting it, a week ago. Going back to work slowed me down a bit, and the pair ended up taking me about five days. Go go stockingette!

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