I Swore I Wouldn't Sock Again

Hello, all! My profile is telling you lies, first off. I am no longer in Berlin, home of Fadeninsel and myriad wild and wonderful knitting magazines: I am back home in Dublin, where there are huge numbers of sheep but strangely enough hardly any yarn shops. Work is crazy busy, as is trying to move my head from one of the most chilled and scruffy cities in Europe to one of the most commercial and hectic. Little time for knitting.

But - but - have you seen the new Magknits? The prettiest accessories ever! I was only browsing, I swear, and then I suddenly saw the prettiest socks ever: Snicket. Lovely, fancy socks that wree neither lacey (who wants woolen winter socks with holes in?) nor frou-frou: just a lovely simple-looking lace pattern. Simple-looking, that is.



This, now this is the heel, done in a new-to-me funky double-stitch method. ANYTHING to avoid the heel-flap picking-up-stitches vale of misery. ANYTHING. Even knitting on six, count them, needles with a seventh to boot AND - AND - at one stage - cabling every so often too. I didn't feel the rage quite as badly as when I was doing the heel-flap on the Jaywalkers, but I made horrendous mistakes. And yes, there is a weeny hole where the gusset joins the heel. Again.



Heel turned! I do think I like the look of it better than the heel-flap misery, nonetheless.



It looks like such a simple sweet pattern, but oh no: the twisted cabling, one stitch at a time, is deceptively tricky. No television-watching while knitting this one. It's worth the messing around, though - look at that gorgeous transition from the twisted rib to the lattice pattern! I'm not sure that the marled yarn I'm using shows the twists to their best advantage, but oh well.



And here is Snicket's leg, showing the gorgeous subtle, subtle transitions of the yarn. The designer says that the pattern is intended to mimick net sleeves, but I think that in this yarn (Fortissima/ Socka Colori, 75% wool 25% polyamide), whose colourway is after all called "Turf", the pattern looks more like an artefact that's been preserved in a peat bog: an ancient branch, perhaps, that shows its ring pattern when it's dug up, or perhaps even the half-erased half-uncials or leather tooled binding of a long-buried mediaeval psalter.

If one is to be fanciful about so mundane an object as socks. Which, it appears, is actually de rigeur, in the strange strange world that is internet sock knitting....