happy peeking toesies

Hey baby…

what's that?

…do those socks go all the way up?

they're tall

No. Only about halfway.

orata socks

Ta da!

My orata socks. (Rav me!)
Pattern: Not!
Yarn: Crown Mountain Farms Sock Hop, Sunshine of your love colorway, 2 skeins
Needle: US 3
Started: February 6
Finished: March 13

Okay, so. How did I knit these? I started at the toes. Cast on. Figure eight. (I do like that one.)

los toes

I knit some. Feather and fan. Then I got to the heel. Forked it.

the heel

heel--action shot

Knit the leg for a bit. And then, because I still had tons of yarn, I kept going. And going and going.

I had to put some (apparently very large) calf increases in there. Did.

calves of Bellville

Knit some ribbing, and cast off.

the sadness of sag

Done.

And now we do the dance of joy!

I think I'll dance a jigor point my toes all pretty-likeor perhaps do an oomph-pa-pa dance

Okay, so maybe it was a bit more complicated than that.

Wait, was it? Not really. The only slightly tricksy bit was doing the calf increases in pattern. Which I kind of winged, but it turned out pretty nice. I think.

ze calf

Kalani said I should write up the pattern, but I am Not A Fan Of Writing Up My Patterns. (Milanese lace much?) But being the wonderful and compromising person that I am, I wrote down how I did the increases on the second sock. Er, that I had to figure out again since I didn’t write it down when I did it on the first sock. No matter. Twas simple.

So you know how feather and fan in the round goes, yes? About like so, depending on how many stitches you have:

Row 1: k
Row 2: k
Row 3: (k2tog) 2x, (yo k1) 4x, (k2tog) 2x
Row 4: p

So I had 48 stitches on my needles. (Although please don’t ask me what my gauge was. I knit socks toe-up so I don’t have to figure out my stinkin’ gauge.) I used dpns. Four of them. The up parts (the yos) were in the middle of each needle, and the down parts (the k2tog parts) were on the ends. All of my increases happened every fourth row, on that Row 3 hey-this-is-the-exciting-bit row, between repeats. And they went a little something like this:

Increase row 1: (at the back of the sock) (duh) yo, m1, yo
Increase row 2: (remember it only happens every fourth row!) m1, k3, m1
Increase row 3: (k1, yo) 3x, k2
Increase row 4: k2, (yo, k1) 3x, yo, k2

And uh, yeah. That was it. At the end of the sequence, I had increased 12 stitches. I knit the next Row 3 normally, then did the increase sequence once more. Viola. Sock that fits.

calf close up

Well, mostly. I only knit about an inch of ribbing because I ran out of yarn. I do wish I could have made the ribbing a bit longer, because they slide town a tiny bit, as evidenced in the pictures above. Not too bad, though.

As for the amount of yarn left over, I had about a yard left of each skein, give or take. And I would have taken a picture of that, but. Um. After that last picture? Something bad happened.

I dropped my camera. Onto a cement step.

Nels (who is getting a lot better at taking pictures, don’t you think?) had been shooting for me, and was handing me the camera to look at what he had gotten so far. I grabbed it, but neither of us realized that the strap was looped around his hand. My nice Pentax digital SLR slipped from my grasp at about the same time that the strap worked itself free of Nels’. Crunch.

Actually, it’s not THAT bad. The camera body itself sustained no damage. But the lens? Not so much.

So yeah, I need a new lens. So until then…. Well, until then nothing. Go look at my sock pictures again! Gosh aren’t they pretty?