blog 2

From 2020 Aug 

Blanks: It keeps me up at night thinking about blanks… Here is a palette which is knitted up double. It's intended for socks, for sure, because once you paint it you have 2 balls of 50 grams each, one for each sock to be identical.

I have to chuckle, because when I started to knit my two socks, I THOUGHT I would knit two-at-a-time on one circular needle. Knit them without rolling the yarn into a ball! But my real intention was to figure out if my pattern on the blank would convert to the same pattern on a sock. So, a better use of my time would be to do 1 sock, and see if that's what I wanted.

I knew it wasn't going to be simple, and a bit disappointed that it wasn't MADE simple by KnitPicks. First of all, what you see on the blank is knitted double with a gauge of 4.5 stitches per inch. On the label it says the yarn is to be knitted with needles #1-3 for a gauge of 7-8 stitches per inch. And second, and maybe even MORE confounding is the fact that the blank is knitted in stockinette back and forth (flat) and socks, well, are circular.

big foot sock – notice purple is pooling as I had hoped

After much deliberation (instead of a good night's sleep), I figured that a symmetrical pattern located at the vertical mid-point could line up with using each row of blank as one row of circular knitting. I knew I wanted 64 stitches around in fingering weight with small-ish needles, but if that didn't "eat up" a full row of blank, the pattern wouldn't line up. And… it didn't. Not until I loosely tensioned the yarn with US 4/3.5 mm needles. Even then, it wasn't totally reliable, and the fabric was very loose, and you could see right through it. That, my friends, makes for very poor socks…socks that will wear out fast, and your "big-foot" recipient will hate it. Even as a hanging Christmas stocking, there would be no surprise as to what's inside!

I found knitting at the 7-8 sts=1 inch gauge makes a great sock, and the colors swirl around, and I'm very happy. (See email for photos.)

OK…I'm done with wordpress for now. I'm going to continue my ramblings directly to you on email. Let me know if you want to be removed from my mailing list. (WordPress isn't "talking" to my photos, and I can't be bothered to figure out the problem.)

Finished Socks

Share this: