Lindsay Socks

I finished the Lindsay socks in record time, possibly because of the extra knitting time while walking, and without getting run over or anything. I cast on for these socks last Tuesday, so I'd have something to work on at the pub, and finished them on Saturday evening. That's a pretty fast sock, especially out of a wee little yarn like Koigu KPPPM.

The leg is a little shorter than the pattern suggests it to be, because I am always paranoid with KPPPM that I will run out of yarn before I finish. Not only do the skeins seem so tiny, but because of my larger-than-average feet, I'm always knitting a larger-than-average sock, so I worry that if I try to make the pattern as written, I will run out in the final moments. Of course, that is less of a worry with a toe-up sock than with one that is top-down. The idea of finishing off the toe of a lovely sock in a different yarn does not appeal to me.


You have noticed, I'm sure, that the two socks aren't a perfect match, colour wise. Despite the skeins being the same colour and the same dye lot, there is clearly a lot more of the dark purple in one sock than in the other. The stitch pattern shows up very nicely in the lighter skein, but is masked somewhat in the other. Such is fate when you buy yarns that are handpainted. If I wanted to hide the difference between the skeins, I could have knit each sock using both skeins, just alternating the skeins between every row or every couple of rows, but that is awfully fiddly for a simple little sock project, and besides, who wants their socks to be too matchy-matchy anyway?

A Walk 'n' Knit Experiment

One thing I find annoying in life is having to run errands that cut into my prime knitting time (which is, like, all of my time.) At Sock Summit, Cat Bordhi commented on what a sedentary hobby knitting can be, and encouraged us to get up and move while we knit: to knit while walking. Since my little ladybug project bag is designed to hang from my wrist, I decided that my walk to the bank this morning was a perfect chance to try it out.


Here is your first glimpse of my Lindsay socks, from a pattern from Cookie A's new sock book. That is some delectable Koigu KPPPM on those needles, and the top two repeats of the pattern were knit while I was walking to the bank and back. Can you tell? I don't really see a difference in the gauge, although when I stretch and feel the different sections of the sock, I can feel a looseness in the gauge of those two repeats. Overall, I would say it was successful. I didn't run into anyone or anything while walking, and I got some knitting done, so the errand didn't feel like a total waste of my time. I did get some real gawkers, though -- just as Cat predicted, some people's minds were certainly blown to see me walking down the street, casually knitting a sock.