Sock it to 'em

Well, here they finally are; at least, here's one of them, because it's just easier to do it that way when you have balance issues. After all, they're both the same, and my feet are (within reasonable limits) the same size, so if you've seen the left one, you've seen the right one. Here's the side view:

As you see, they are - as I suspected they might be - a little loose; but they're not so loose that they have to be worn as oversocks. They're just loose enough that they can be if I want. I'll be making the next pair a little smaller, but not much, since they're a pretty reasonable fit round the foot. They just bag a little at the front of the ankle... not a place I expected them to do it. It would also not hurt if they were a little snugger round the leg. Before I had my guts so drastically replumbed, a pair of socks that was generous around the ankles would have been a very useful thing to have, because I had a tendency to retain a bit too much water at times and I'd end up with swollen ankles (admittedly this was a lot worse in very hot weather, when I would obviously not be wearing any socks at all, but it did occasionally happen at other times). Since having a stoma, though, I haven't had a trace of that problem, which just goes to show that there's always a silver lining if you're prepared to look hard enough.

The cast-off is a species of crochet, which is yet another sock trick I learnt from my sister. I have no idea whether it's single or double crochet; all I know is it's not treble (I know how to do treble crochet - everyone does, don't they?) But it's very easy to do, it's neat, and it stretches very gracefully with your ribbing.

Overall, for an experimental pair, I'm pretty chuffed. I know how to tweak next time, plus I have an entirely wearable pair of socks. And I also now have this:

I think I've mentioned it before (this is the acrylic-based sock yarn that's about a quarter of the price of the fancy yarn I used for the yellow pair), but what I don't think I've told you is exactly how I came across it. It was the baby hats. You know how I like to use two strands of 4-ply to make marled welts ranging from subtle to funky? LoveCrafts don't really do very much in the way of 4-ply that I'm prepared to knit with, but in my last order from them (indeed, my last ever order from them) I went and looked again to see if they had any in acrylic, and I scored one ball in red and one in bright yellow. And the yellow one was King Cole Simply Footsie, in other words the plain version of the yarn shown above; I think it's a discontinued shade.

I took a great deal of pleasure in working that together with the red to make a welt for an orange hat, which looked amazing:

At the same time, though, I thought "h'mm... this is meant to be a sock yarn. I wonder if they do the same thing in random shades?" And the answer to that one - recalling Professor Cyril Joad from The Brains Trust - turned out to be "well, it all depends what you mean by 'they'." LoveCrafts don't, but King Cole absolutely do... and that's how I discovered the Wool Box, which is rapidly becoming my new yarn supplier of choice.

So my next task, at least on the sock front, is to work up a tension swatch using this odd ball of yellow, and then from that work out how many stitches I need for socks in this yarn. I'm not sure there will be much difference, as the gauge looks very much the same, despite the fact that the manufacturers recommend different sized needles for the two yarns. (In fact I used 3 mm needles for the yellow pair because I didn't have anything finer, whereas King Cole recommend 3.25 mm for the Footsie... and I shall probably stick with the 3 mm because it works. Clearly this isn't like DK, where you're pretty much always using 4 mm needles regardless of the brand or type. It's another world.) I don't know when I'm going to be able to do that, because at the moment I'm beavering away on the Alice script again ("can we reinstate the entire Tea Party scene as it was and cut Alice's lines elsewhere to accommodate that? And can we simplify the language?" I'm not sure that the language is in any way complicated, but fine...), and there's the netting to think about, and we have a church lunch coming up on Sunday so there's the usual baking. But it shall be done. I have been well and truly bitten by the sock bug.

King Cole, incidentally, are really good for sock yarns. I had no idea. They don't just do both kinds of the Footsie; they also have a nice cotton sock yarn in various plain colours, and a random cotton one which I suspect is seasonal, because at the moment the site is showing only one colourway and it's out of stock. People don't normally make yarns in a single colourway. I think there are going to turn out to be a few of them and they'll land on the site maybe around April or May. I shall be keeping a close eye on the situation. I don't actually much like the single colourway they're showing, but I have already got the picture that the site does this. It's like Minerva these days. With Minerva, you used to be able to link a specific colour of a fabric, but now you can't do that; the best you can do is link the fabric and tell people to click on whichever colour it is you want to show them. The Wool Box is much the same, only more so; it's a bit disconcerting until you get used to it. I had three different Simply Footsie yarns in my basket, as in the photo, and every one of them was represented in my basket by the default photo, which wasn't actually any of those colourways! So I think that when the random cotton comes back, there'll probably be some versions of it that are more to my taste.

I'm looking forward to that. Now I just have to work out where I'm going to put it...