FO: Crosswalker Socks

I'm back! And I want to tell you all about my fabulous holiday in Nova Scotia and P.E.I., but we got home late last night and there is laundry to be done, things to be washed and put away, all that post-road-trip stuff, so for now I'll just show you the socks I finished on the road.


The free pattern can be found here. I tweaked the pattern a bit; in fact, I probably wouldn't recommend this pattern to a first-time sock knitter. It's not a bad pattern, but you need to know how socks work in order to tweak successfully.

Here's the main thing: Because the diagonal stitch pattern really cuts down on stretchability, you need to work the leg on 80 stitches, but when you get to the foot -- where only the top of the foot is worked in that diagonal pattern -- 80 stitches will probably be too large. I continued the gusset decreases until I had just 30 stitches for the bottom of the foot (still 40 for the top). Keep in mind, though, that you want to end up with the same number of stitches on the top and the bottom when you get to the toe; to even things out, on the last 10 rounds of the foot, I did the decreases at the sides but not the increases in the middle -- this way, I ended up with 30 stitches on both top and bottom when it came time to decrease for the toe.

One more tweak that is worth doing: Because the stitch pattern involves side-by-side increases and decreases, it makes more sense to put the gusset and toe decreases side-by-side, too, than to follow the pattern's traditional "knit to the last 3 stitches, k2tog, k1" / "k1, ssk, knit to end" decreases and end up with a knit stitch or two between decreases.

I still like the colours together in the ball better than how they actually came out in the socks, but I'm warming up to them. I finished the second sock yesterday afternoon while we were driving through New Brunswick, and I realized as I looked out the window that all the colours in the yarn could also be seen in the landscape outside: yellow wildflowers, green trees with some leaves turning reddish, brown dirt, yellow-green marshes, blue patches of sky. And then I was happier with my socks.


I've got lots and lots of photos to sort out, but I'll be back soon to tell you about my trip. Do you think I bought yarn? It's possible....