No Pattern Sock University

I’m on a mission to learn everything there is to learn about knitting socks. My knowledge base is fairly extensive, but I haven’t necessarily knitted every technique that i have read about.

Feeling confident after completing my Kai Mei socks, I decided to get right out of my comfort zone and try to make a pair of socks that involves learning/doing things I haven’t done before, and also not using a sock pattern.

The photo at the top is the first phase of this experiment. I chose the oldest sock yarn in my stash, a couple of ball of Regia sock yarn that were bought in either 2006, or 2007. I like the blues, but I’m not excited about the brown stripes, and for experimental socks, it won’t be a big deal if they are a disaster.

The first thing I did was to knit a gauge swatch. I am not particularly good at doing this, but then the things I have been knitting in recent years don’t really require gauge swatching. But this is a new chapter in my knitting adventure, so I wanted to do everything by the book.

Knitting a gauge swatch on straight needles is simple enough, but if you are swatching for a sock, it should be knitted in the round, the way you will be knitting your sock. This is where I came a cropper. I followed an online tip about a quicker way to swatch in the round, which involved knitting in the same way as you would an i-cord, but not pulling the yarn tight. I made a note of my gauge from that swatch, and worked out that I needed 60 stitches for my sock.

From there I worked out that using Judy’s Magic Cast-On for a toe-up sock – both of which I am trying for the first time – I needed 10 pairs of stitches. I cast on, and then I did my increases for the toe. By the time I had reached my 60 stitches I knew I had two mistakes in my sock. The least worrisome was the fact I knew I had missed a knit row in between increases right at the start of the toe, which wasn’t very noticeable, and not a hughe deal in and of itself. The second mistakes was that I had somehow managed to start knitting the magic cast on the wrong way round, so it wasn’t very magic at all, and therefore not at all invisible. For some reason I had also knitted the cast on where the yarn was very quickly going to change from light to dark blue.

At this point I decided that these were acceptable errors in an experimental sock, and I kept knitting until the sock was as it appear in the first photo.

At this point I decided to check my gauge on the sock, and discovered that there was a difference between it and my original gauge swatch. This is where one of the pros of knitting toe-up socks comes into play – you can try it on your foot. It was too small.

I set it aside, and grabbed the second ball of the same yarn, and decided to cast on the second sock and try to do it properly. I got the cast-on right, and I increased without incident up to the right number of stitches…

Now that I had two toes in front of me, and I knew I was going to frog one, I decided why not add another string to my bow, and make this pair two-at-a-time…

tbc…