Rogue Roses Socks

For the second shipment of the Rockin' Sock Club, we got a pattern by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee and a skein of mediumweight Socks that Rock in a colour called Gertrude Skein (ha ha.) I have to admit that I didn't take to the colour right away -- on certain days, in certain light, I loved it, with its nice rosy shades. On other days, and in other light, it looked like muddy greens and orangey oranges. Not my favourites. One of the great things about the Rockin' Sock Club is that it can get you out of the comfort zone of only working with the same colours all the time. I kept an open mind and just looked at it on my coffee table for a month or so while I worked on other projects, and once I finished my Red Ruffle shawl, I cast on for the socks.


They went very quickly (maybe because it's a mediumweight sock yarn, or maybe because I had just finished a project with 2200 stitches on the needles, so 64 stitches is like chump change.) The first night, I did the cute little hem at the top with its adorable picot edge. In a day and a half, I was three-quarters of the way through one sock. Then I realized that the foot was not as snug as I'd like, so I ripped it back through the heel flap and used a smaller needle (US2 instead of US3) for the heel flap and foot. Much better.


Despite that setback, it still took me just over a week to finish the socks. It could be because it was fun to do the Rogue Roses stitch, which you can see makes little rosebuds every now and then. Added benefit of the rosebuds: they break up pooling that the yarn was trying really hard to do, especially in the foot of the sock. I could see as I went that if it weren't for that stitch using up yarn every six rows, I would have had some serious colour pooling and striping in the foot. Yay for funky stitch patterns!