What’s not to love?
An overstuffed sock drawer! I’ve gotten away from knitting socks for that reason. And because I have a lot of partial skeins of sock yarn that I need to work through before I have a clear enough conscience to buy more.
This spring while we were visiting family, we stopped into a local yarn shop. My sister, who doesn’t knit or crochet, was admiring some of the colors. I told her that if she bought the yarn, I would knit a pair of socks for her. Win-win!
She chose Sparkle Sock in the colorway Rainbow Connection V1.2 from ShirtsyCat Designs. The subtle color variations are amazing and the sliver stellina non-metal fiber adds just the right amount of sparkle.
Then my sister gave me free rein to choose the stitch pattern. I wanted something pretty, of course, but the stitch pattern also had to strike a balance between being intricate enough to minimize potential color pooling and simple enough not to compete with the color variations in the yarn.
I chose Pointelle from the book “Knit. Sock. Love.” by Cookie A. For as complicated as the socks look, the charts for each foot — yes, the motifs for right and left are mirrored — made the pattern surprisingly easy to knit. And the softness of the yarn made the experience that much more enjoyable. (I’m not affiliated with any of these, by the way.)
As usual before starting the pattern, I researched comments on Ravelry. I found a few that I thought might be helpful, but there was only one that I ended up using. Ibnik shared a pair of videos for “the perfect pick-up” of heel flap stitches. Here they are:
I really liked this technique and will use it going forward. It was a little more effort to pick up the stitches but, in the end, the heel flap looked just a bit more polished to me.
All in all, I had my sock-knitting fix, my sister has a new hand knit pair of socks, and my sock drawer still closes — barely.
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