Herringbone Socks

The name of this pattern sounds decadent. Herringbone. It is one of those words that makes me feel, with my poet’s heart, like it means more than it is letting on. As if it were a pattern for royalty.

Terri chose the pattern for these stranded colorwork socks from Around the World in Knitted Socks by Stephanie van der Linden and I suggested the colors, a classic gray and spicy pumpkin. The yarn is Knit Picks Stoll and, this being my first time using this yarn, I will judge it based on its performance with this project.

While I have knit a colorwork sweater in the round, I’ve never made socks with more than one color. One concern is a resulting sock with too tight floats. To combat this in advance I decided to try knitting using the needle farthest from myself. This will keep the floats on the outside of the knitting and will be, essentially, like knitting the sock inside out.

I used the slipknot cast-on to create a stretchy beginning row. Although I was doubtful that knots would be stretchy, the resulting edge follows the rib and actually is very stretchy. I had some trouble getting it going until I figured out that keeping tension on the back of the loop helps tremendously. 

A pretty good start for the royally named socks. Now I just have to get past 15 rows of ribbing.