One of my goals for this year is to knit 12 things – I laid out (more than 12) projects in groups with patterns, yarn, and needles all organized in their own ziploc baggies. After 7 months, I think I am finished with 4 things – and I’m also thinking that maybe I need to knit smaller things???

I haven’t knitted many socks so far in my life and most of the ones I have knitted were of my own making (I really don’t like to follow patterns, I’m much better at making it up as I go along…) But, I loved a bunch of the patterns from the Eclectic Sole book and I knitted these socks with white sock yarn, big surprise there huh? And with the variegated green yarn given to me by my friend Monica.

This time I decided I wanted a better fit so I used a pattern called Migration (from the Eclectic Sole book I borrowed from The Kniterella, who I am actually flying to Louisiana to see today) and tested the gauge before I started. That would have been fine except that to reinforce the heel, I decided to knit the two strands together (without going down a needle size). And then do the same thing on the cuff, again without going down a needle size (or two). Now the socks fit my husband, and I have to knit me another pair on smaller needles.

I learned a few important lessons knitting these socks:

1. If you want your socks to fit with the pattern and gauge you started with – follow the pattern, exactly, no deviations, none, … I mean it!
2. I learned the figure 8 cast on method from a group of very helpful YouTube videos.
3. I think I should have followed this video instead.
4. This is not a pattern to knit at a Stitch & Bitch  evening with wine or where you have to talk to anyone… I think I started and restarted these socks 4 or 5 times because I would lose count of the toe row increases…enough said. I think I finally switched to two contrasting needle colors with the gold needle being the one for a new round (I would say “Go for the Gold” and mark another row each time I came to that needle).
5. This pattern might work better with two yarns that are more similar in size – otherwise the bottom of the sock has a ribbing kind of a feel to them rather than a smooth feel. (I’m kind of like the princess and the pea when it comes to clothing & shoes, so I might notice this difference more than others would).
6. This isn’t a pattern that is written perfectly. As I settled into a chair for the long haul, which was an all day Saturday board meeting, I discovered an error in the pattern. It gave me a different number of stitches than the printed pattern used. After about 5 times of recounting stitches and looking at the instructions again, I concluded it couldn’t possibly be right. Frustrated and about 2 hours into the meeting, I went online with my iPhone to see if I could find “Corrections” for this publication. I did. It was an error. I fixed it and went on. It was that simple… moral of the story is don’t second guess yourself after confirming the error the first time.
7. Don’t try a new bind off method (I had to look this one up) on socks where you care about the fit. Try it on a swatch first, then you can adjust your tension. I entered these socks in the San Mateo County Fair this year and one of the judges comments was that the bind off is too loose. It’s OK with me when putting the socks on because I don’t like tight bindings, but I can see why the judges called it out. I could have just used the green yarn by itself and been fine, but, as I mentioned above, I used both strands, which made it bigger and then the actual bind off method made it even looser.

I enjoyed knitting these when I had a big block of quiet time, which happens to be almost never. I didn’t much like knitting them in meetings or while watching TV because I had to pay way too much attention to what row I was on. I am looking forward to trying the particular cast on and cast off methods again.