Excluding the background, the eagle-eyed among you will have noticed two major differences. These are the Monkey socks I gleefully cast on for during Stitches South back in April. I picked these guys back up this summer, knit happily away until I got to the heel flap, and was marveling over how fast these socks knit up until I realized that I was missing a fourth needle's worth of stitches. *smacks forehead* No wonder they were going so fast ... I was only knitting 3/4ths of the sock! I still can't believe I omitted an entire needle from the cast on ... I blame it on the intoxicating fumes of all things fiber that permeated Stitches South. Clearly, I was in some form of fiber-induced coma that temporarily disabled my counting abilities. So that was major difference #1 ... in the second picture I have frogged and re-cast on using the appropriate number of needles. I was happily determined to quickly re-knit the progress I had lost, until I encountered major difference #2 ... the dreaded pooling. I have to admit, this is my first encounter in which the pooling became dreaded. In the past, I've been lucky enough that I liked or didn't mind any pooling that's occurred. So now I feel a little stuck. I really love this colorway, but I prefer it as it appears in the first picture ... I'm not in love with the khaki color enough to tolerate huge pools of it in my socks. Any suggestions? I've found one pattern, Everyone Outta The Pool that claims to effectively break up unwanted pooling. Any other suggestions? I'm currently using size 2 needles ... the size of the pooling is so large that I'd be surprised if I could break it up by switching to size 1's, but I haven't tried that yet.
Unfortunately, this is only part one of my sock woes ... tune in tomorrow for part two ...
2 comments:
I've had the best luck with combination slipped stitch/stranded patterns like Crusoe or Leyburn when I'm working with yarn that tends to pool. (Take that with a grain of salt, though, 'cause for both patterns I had to adjust the stitch count dramatically to get a wearable size, so as written they may not hep with pooling that much.)
I'm no expert, but I agree with Randi on slipped stitch patterns. I'm working Harvest Dew right now... I can't remember who it's by off the top of my head, but it's wonderful for multi-color strands with pooling tendency!
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