Stripes, set, match
No, I did not finish these while watching the Australian Open. I haven’t watched a game of tennis since Ivan Lendl stopped playing. (I know. Even I am embarrassed about him now, but I used to weep horribly every time he lost at Wimbledon!) I mostly watched Law & Order SVU reruns on my fragile TV reception, and Murder, She Wrote reruns on Netflix Instant Watch. After every episode I feel my eyes widen and stay like that, my head bobbing eagerly like Angela Lansbury’s, all cheeks and no chin. She wears handknits quite often on the show (’80s arans, mostly) but I haven’t ever seen her knitting, have you? She’s quite the active, running older woman on the show, and I wonder if they consciously stayed away from any knitting to avoid the granny image.
ANYWAY, one pair down, two to go.
Austermann Step socks, colourway no. 8. Pink and grey is a beautiful combination!
Toe-up with a crochet chain cast on and wrapped stitches, which I first learnt from Wendy’s tutorial here.
60 stitches for the foot, and 64 from the ankle up, size 0 bamboos.
A Russian bind-off. The way I learnt this (somewhere on the web) is to p2tog loosely, slip stitch back to left needle, p2tog, repeat all the way, preferably with a larger needle. But here is a video for a completely different Russian bind off , which is most intriguing, and which I look forward to trying.
I took care to make the stripes line up. All seemed well, until the very end of the second sock, when a couple of straight white lines threatened to derail everything. The cuffs were going to be all wrong.
I was whining about this to a (non-knitting) friend who couldn’t understand the fuss, and said, well isn’t that what handicrafts are supposed to be, slightly off? I muttered in my head about how I wasn’t sure who or what was off here, and after a deep sigh, frogged the second cuff, cut off some yarn and reknit it to get the two cuffs to match up. The Harlot is right, as usual; only a sock dork can understand the joy of the stripes matching up. I am not usually very obsessive-compulsive about these things, but I am, I find, a sock dork. The cuffs match, and I am pleased.
This yarn is good! A little fibery, but soft, and very warm. Cosy on my feet on a chilly saturday afternoon. I am itching to knit up the other two sock pairs, but I’m also dying to try out that sideways hat my grad student was wearing. Maybe head before feet next, then.
Good lookin’ socks! I have a ball of Austerman that I got as a present and have never knit up. Your socks make me think this is the year I use it
I used not to get the need to match stripes exactly, and then I had a pair that was ALMOST perfect… and suddenly I understood. It’s like, if you’re just going in general for something vaguely matchy, that can be fine. But if they’re just a tiny bit off, yes, that’s hard to get over.
Very nice! I like the idea of knitting socks to Angela Lansbury.
Nice colours. How gratifying to be able to achieve matchiness!
So, I won’t knit with self-striping yarn for the simple reason that I’m afraid I wouldn’t be able to do what you’ve done. You nailed those stripes, lady! Nicely done.
oohhh pretty!