Real Love Socks

With the lack of other entertainment on the weekend (and because I am still trying to spend a lot of time resting my knee) I managed to get a lot of knitting done. After I finished my Monkey socks, the only thing I had left unpacked and in-progress were my Real Love socks. It was probably a good thing, since the complexity of the travelling twisted stitches meant that I put these off more often than I worked on them.

If you recall, I got a twisted-stitch reference book for my birthday, and right away I threw together a couple of potential sock designs out of it. This was the first one, and is wide enough that it will fit my feet, in a very fine gauge. I had thought about potentially writing the pattern up to offer it to other people, but I'm not sure it would be very useful, since people with more normally sized feet would probably have a hard time making them fit without a lot of adjustments, anyway. In my experience, it's easier to upsize a sock pattern than to downsize one (assuming you can't just knit the whole thing at a tighter gauge, and I think that trying to knit a sock at a tighter gauge than 10 stitches per inch might just be crazy.) The next twisted-stitch sock pattern I have planned will be more appropriate, that way, and I may try my hand at selling knitting patterns, then.


I think I went into some detail on the patterns last time I mentioned these socks, but basically I just chose three that I thought were interesting together, that had the same repeat length in rows, and that created an interesting negative space (i.e. the purl background between the center motif and the one on either side, which you can see better on the first photo, or even better on this one I posted ages ago.) There is a span of the patterns where the stitches don't move, so I used that piece for the ribbing at the cuff, and also for the heel flap and for the toe. I think it looks pretty cool.

I named them Real Love socks partly because it takes some real love and dedication to make a 96-stitch circumference sock for size 10 feet, and also because I had John Lennon's song Real Love running around in my head while I was knitting them.


Funny side note: the current issue of Interweave Knits has a few twisted-stitch designs in there, and two of them use the same motifs as I did for these socks. Check out this one which uses the motif I have on the side of the leg, and this one which uses the double chain motif that I have beside it. Out of literally hundreds of stitch motifs in that book, we ended up with duplicates. Great minds think alike.