Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Socks at Last!


I started these socks well before Christmas, put them aside for some Christmas knitting, took them to Maine with me and finished the first sock there, and finally just finished the second sock yesterday. The yarn is on the heavy side for sock yarn, and the needles on the small side (US 1.5) so these are remarkably dense and chunky.

The pattern is by Anne Hanson, called Holidazed, and the yarn is Socks That Rock Mediumweight in the colorway Jasper. I saw a pair that the Yarn Harlot knit in a blue colorway and was smitten, and I ordered the pattern and yarn within moments, from Blue Moon Fiber Arts. I cast on 56 stitches instead of my usual 64, but I ended up having to make the leg section shorter than I normally would because the cuff was turning out a little too tight to go all the way up my calfs. And I decided to decrease only down to 64 on the foot section, for fear that would also be too tight. So if I were to make these again, I would cast on 64 stitches. But these fit nice and snug and are uber-cozy.

3 comments:

Carrie Penny said...

They look so warm and cozy! Very pretty, I love the color!

Willow said...

Well done! Aren't handknit socks just the best?

Knitting Linguist said...

They're lovely! What a wonderful color, too :)

Thank you so much for your comment, too, about the field methods class. The short answer is that we're working bilingually, asking our consultant to translate into Bengali. You are absolutely right that this requires a HUGE amount of care to at least attempt to avoid getting data that have been forced to fit an English pattern. I'm working with the students on that as they plan their elicitations, and we're lucky in that we have a speaker who is comfortable saying when a sentence produces something that's weird Bengali. Since I've always worked with endangered Native California languages in the field, and since all the speakers I've worked with use English as their dominant language in daily life, that kind of mitigation is a big concern in my own work, since it's so easy to just end up with a word-for-word translation of English.

I'm guessing that your birthday's coming up soon, too? Happy early birthday!