Oh. Hello again, craftblog.

...long time no see (by the way, I was excited/amused to find out that this idiom has an almost exact counterpart in Chinese. I never used to use it before, but now for some reason it keeps slipping in to my mental dialogue).

I have many excuses I could offer for almost immediately wandering away from this thing, including travel, dead computer, moving (arg), and the start of school with accompanying Big Thesis Project, but I won't try; this is after all a hobby about a hobby and I've only got so much mental energy. That said, I'd rather manage at least a couple of posts a month after this. We shall see.

When we last left our heroes, the Austrian Patterned Knee Socks had made it through a rough patch and were on their way to getting finished. By the time I had grafted both sets of toes, however, my computer had expired (thankfully not for good--a new part set it right again a month later). Yesterday was one of the first days so far to be cool and rainy enough for thick wool kneesocks, and after I'd been wearing them all day it ocurred to me to take some pics.



They are long. I wanted to get a picture of the picot tops, but it's hard to photograph one's own knees in any way that doesn't make them look funny.


They do sort of make my calves look chunkier, being pretty thick (I suspect the yarn for the originals was thinner than Kroy, but even they seem to have the same effect in the photos in the book). The coy pose is partly because after wearing them all day, I discovered that one of my shoes had got soaked through and bled brown dye on the left sock! The bright side is that my feet stayed so warm I didn't notice the wet. The dye will probably come out--I've had this happen to cotton socks and they came out white again--but grr!

Here's a close-up of the back shaping:


Stats:

Pattern: "Austrian-Patterned Knee Socks" from Socks, Socks, Socks

Yarn: Patons Kroy, color "Muslin," four balls (well, three and a half)

Needles: Size 0 Inox aluminum DPs

Mods: Two pretty minor things. Instead of sewing the picot hems down after the socks were done, I knitted the cast-on edge together with the stitches of the last plain stockinette row. I left about a 6-stitch section un-joined in case I wanted to turn the hem into a casing for elastic, but so far the socks seem to stay up all right on their own.

I did about half an inch of plain stockinette before starting the toe shaping--I thought the proportions looked better that way.

Notes: There's a mistake in the center back chart (B) of this pattern, a pretty obvious one--the first row of the chart is given as all purls. Fortunately it's pretty easy to intuit what it should be, based on the other three rows of the chart. I also added a row of k2, p2, k2, p2, k2 at the end of chart E (making it 12 rows instead of 11), because it seemed to make more sense to have it there--if you have the book, look at the chart and you'll see what I mean.

I had never done twisted-stitch cabling like this before--this was the first knitting project I'd been intimidated by in a long time, and the first couple of inches were pretty frustrating. By the time I was halfway down the leg of the first sock, I was doing 6-stitch, three-way crosses without a cable needle. So I'm pretty proud of this project, on the whole.