Self-designed circus socks

I was so happy with my first pair of self-designed socks that I decided to make another! I’d just bought a beautiful skein of hand-dyed sock yarn, and my original pattern was for worsted weight, so I had to make up another one to suit the finer yarn.

On the first pair one of the heel flaps was too short and the other was too long, so with this pair I tried to get it somewhere in the middle, which required me trying it on every few rows as I was knitting it. I think I’ve got it pretty spot on, so I’ll be using this heel flap stitch/row ratio in all my future socks.

You may remember from the original sock post that I tried two different types of toes; a round toe and a regular toe. For some reason (I have literally no idea why) on this pair I decided to experiment again and tried another toe listed in Cookie A’s Sock Innovation (where the round toe came from). This proved far less successful than the round one; she calls it a wedge toe, which means you decrease every other round and then continue doing this until it’s as long as you want it, which creates a strangely pointy and extremely uncomfortable toe! I definitely won’t be using this technique again.

Luckily I regained my senses and worked a comfortable round toe on the second sock!

(On the left is the comfortable round toe, and on the right is the weird pointy one)

Aside from that there’s not much to say about the designing process, as I used exactly the same books as for the fist pair. I did have a couple of false starts where I miscalculated my gauge, but apart form that it went pretty smoothly!

I’m SO obsessed with this yarn. It’s from a local hand-dyer (who doesn’t have website, or else I’d link to it) and is in the colour way ‘Circus’. It’s mostly orange and pink, but has some awesome speckles of neon green in it as well. Colour-wise, this is probably the most adventurous yarn I’ve ever bought! Its your classic merino/nylon sock blend, and although it says ‘handwash only’ on the label I’m going to knit a little swatch and try machine washing it. I’ll update this post once I’ve tried it.

So there you have it, my second pair of self designed socks. I feel like I’m a few socks away from having a ‘master pattern’ that I can just plug endless stitch patterns into to create infinite socks. I’m really enjoying writing these sock posts, so I think I’ll make it a regular thing from now on!