- 75 g. (about 350 yards) of 75% wool, 25% nylon sock yarn from Etsy.
- Size 1 (2.5 mm) Addi turbo Magic Loop, 72 stitches at 9 st/inch.
- Toe-up, figure-8 cast-on, modified round toe.
- Moderately frilly bindoff.
- Afterthought heel (decrease pattern self-designed).
The fit's not perfect. They're a little long in the foot. Could be narrower in the ankles, wider in the toes. And I could have done a better job with picking up extra stitches at the corners of the heel, and of handling the last few rounds of the the heels.
But they feel wonderful on the foot (and in the shoe). Soft and snug. And I'm so happy with the little targets on the heels and the overall continuity of the striping—afterthought is the right way to do the heels for yarn with narrow stripes.
They were fun to knit. I love the stripes—these socks will get worn! But as I knit I maintained a continual interior dialog (what? you don't yell at other people inside your head?) with the dyer, always rooting for the wide stripes to be wider. Some of the orange stripes made it past five rows; others petered out at three and a half. One poor little red stripe was barely a row wide. I tried to make the socks close to identical twins, but the yarn didn't play nice enough for that (see the match at the ends of the toes? and the variation in the width of the first few stripes?). The first heel got inserted into a gray stripe, but the second went into a red; the first sock ended on a big grey stripe, the second on a narrow, so I had to splice in a little extra grey yarn to finish the bindoff.
I'll tell you more about the heels and toes later on. This lovely yarn (the blue/green/brown stuff at the bottom of the entry) is going to get made into a similarly constructed but more carefully considered pair, which I'm going to work top-down—more control over where I put the heel, since it's not constrained by the foot length. Plus I want to try having the heels and toes be constructed very symmetrically: both decreased, instead of one increased, one decreased.
