1 post tagged “riverbed”
To the right is BMP, just before I frogged it. I love the pattern, I love the stranded technique, I love using one hand for each colour, knitting one yarn continental and the other English. Unfortunately, the purple is too dark and too variegated for the fine details of the space invaders to show up. So I frogged it.
For the second attempt at stranded socks, I used the same yarn but switched to the riverbed pattern from New Pathways for Sock Knitting. Specifically to the clematis vine variant, although I had no plans to knit the clematis vine pattern itself. I couldn't find the needles I wanted (Addi 2.5mm) so I settled for Knitpicks 2.25mm, but the number of stitches per inch was off the chart, the toe was too pointy, and the contrast still wasn't working. I frogged it, with no pictures taken.
(I feel as if I'm echoing Neil Gaiman here, with Eve's story about the wives of Adam, and her description of Adam's second wife: "the nameless one, the virgin, was made of flesh and of blood, forgotten, perhaps coldly destroyed, and unmentioned save in the dustiest of books" (The Sandman, "Parliament of Rooks").)
For the third attempt, I switched yarn. I've put the purple Knitwitches away, and I'm using the Vino Veritas colourway of Dream in Color's 'smooshy'. It's a bit fatter than the Knitwitches, and it's very lovely indeed. I'd originally intended to make the embossed leaves socks with it, but I'm a bit uneasy about the idea of the pretty delicate pattern in the strong bold colour, and I don't currently want to knit lace socks, so I'm happy with the repurposing.
This time I changed the toe increases to make a more rounded toe, I found my Addis, and I've actually made an attempt at taking measurements and making calculations. My gauge is still off the chart (this is an annoying flaw in the book - even though knitting stranded tightens up my stitches, this doesn't strike me as a particularly tiny gauge, and 2.5mm is a perfectly sensible (possibly tending to slightly large) size needle, so I'm surprised it's not within the included range), but I've nevertheless worked out roughly what I'm doing. There's a minor problem with some increases, but it looks OK, and it's not enough of a problem to bother frogging back. And to combine the riverbed sockitecture with the BMP I started knitting, I'm putting a single column of space invaders in place of the clematis vine panel. The red is a better contrast than the purple, and I'm just really enjoying knitting this.
