Sock retcon.

As I wrote earlier, Knitting Adventures Were Had this past weekend. The first one involved the Austrian Patterned Knee Socks from this book.

These have already taught me one knitting lesson, which is that even when substituting something as seemingly interchangeable as sock yarn it's important to pay some attention to *all* the little numbers associated with the pattern. I bought 150g of a yarn that gave me the same gauge specified in the pattern, on the same size needles, and only noticed partway into the project that my first ball definitely hadn't lasted as long as it should have... then I compared the ball band to my book.

Heh. Oops. The book doesn't give the brands of yarn used (maybe to avoid dating itself?), but this particular pattern calls for 150g/650yds of yarn. The yarn I bought was Kroy Socks, with 203 yards/50g. Doesn't take a math genius to figure out that three balls of Kroy =/= 650 yards. So I knit to about halfway through the instep decreases on both socks, then set them aside for around a month to wait for more yarn. (I was a bit tight for yarn money, and waiting for Joann.com to have a free shipping coupon. It seemed silly to pay more than the yarn was worth to ship it, when I had other things to work on.)

At any rate, the yarn arrived last week. Fortunately dyelots don't seem to matter too much when the yarn's a commercially dyed off-white, and I cheerfully finished the instep decreases on one sock.



Too bad about those two big cable crosses on the upper left, eh? They're supposed to parallel the two-stitch cable running up the center of the panel, not cross the other way. Grr.

Normally I'm both very picky about mistakes, and pretty bold about laddering down to fix them. This time the former held true, but the latter--not so much. I quailed. I grumbled to myself. 24 rows at about 12 rows to the inch, on 2mm needles, with twisted stitches and the most annoying cable cross in the pattern (twice!). I didn't really doubt I'd do it, but I had to work myself up to it, which is unusual for me. Hence the pictures, which I took as part of the talking-myself-through-it process.



After laddering down. In retrospect, it was pretty clever of me to buy some more tiny dpns along with the yarn to finish these. Heh. (Actually, I needed something to get me up to the bottom limit for the free shipping.)

[Naturally, while I was hauling the sock around in search of well-lit spots to photograph it, I managed to lose my last sock-sized darning needle. Curses. Or 'darn it,' if you please.]

It was really fairly uneventful, though I had to brave the ungodly heat a few times in search of better light (as opposed to lurking in the cool but dim basement like a sane person). And the final repair was kind of lumpy at the edges. But I pulled at it a bit with a needle tip, and hopefully it will smooth out the rest of the way when the socks get washed.



Final steps of repair: knit a few rounds as a victory lap. Pour self a cool glass of Thai iced tea. Take blurry photos of tea, for some reason.