I almost made it.
These were finished on May 2, but I’ve been beyond lazy and/or distracted about photographing them, and on deciding what I was going to do with them. But that will follow.
I planned these socks without really paying attention to the fact that the yarn, Brooklyn Handspun’s yummy Superwash Sock, is in fact more of a sportweight yarn than a fingering weight. This presents a slight problem when knitting a lace pattern on size 1 needles. In this yarn, those instructions would yield something that approximated lizard skin. Not so good. So I had to rejigger the chart and the number of stitches cast on to make it more amenable to being knit at its desired gauge. I cast on 54 stitches to a 3 mm (US 2.5) needle, and trimmed the lace chart a bit to narrow it. Worked like a charm.
Everything was going along swimmingly until I got to the foot portion of the first sock. Then I began to panic about the amount yarn I had left. In my fear-filled haze, I elected to stop the foot early (these were going to be for me) and gift them to one of my more petite-footed family or friends. After finishing sock #2, I found I probably would have had enough yarn to knit them me-sized, but by then it was already May and I was ready to be done with April’s allotment. Thus, size 6-7 socks that I am foisting off on someone else.
I’ve decided the lucky recipient will be my Nanny Jo, who not only has feet of the appropriate size, but also has never received a knitted item from me, and who is responsible for planting most of the seeds of handcrafty love in my childhood. Thus she is in large part responsible for my unstoppable knitting habit today, and it is most fit that she should enjoy these deliciously cushy, bright and spring-y socks. They went in the mail yesterday.
Oh yeah: love this yarn. While it’s a bit too thick for “normal” socks, it’s soft and squishy and I want to make pillows out of it. Yum. The pattern was simple, and while it turned out prettily, it wasn’t as amazing as I’ve come to expect from Stephanie van der Linden. Granted, I did pick the simplest pattern in the book, Around the World in Knitted Socks (link). Perhaps the next one I pull from there will be more in line with her general awesomeness.