You’re going to be looking at this for a while, I’m still totally enthralled by it which is good because I have just got to the halfway point on the first one. I’ve set myself a target of an octave a day, which isn’t very much, less than an hour’s weaving time. Some days I do two octaves, some days I do one and a half and some days I don’t put the loom up at all. At the moment there is a clear difference between the leading edge (bottom of the black key) and the trailing edge (top) on the keys but this yarn is oiled on the cone and I know when the wool hits water and blooms the nasty gap will disappear. I can be pretty confident about this because I’ve used the same yarn before for doubleweave and had the same effect on the loom. After washing, the gaps in the weaving will fill up and the white will look white because you’ll not be seeing the black layer through it. I’m not convinced that hot water will do anything at all for my edges but I can hope. In general the less I mess with them the better they get but I can’t help but fiddle.

Knitting is still blah but socks are pretty essential, especially if you have only one pair of hand knit socks. I made a pair for someone we know after she’d noticed that when the band was playing my husband didn’t get cold feet while she was freezing. Once she had her pair of socks she knew the reason why (“and they don’t fall down”). One pair isn’t enough to see you through the week so she asked me for another pair. These are Opal something or other from a Ravelry destash, which seems to be the source of all my sock yarn these days. I like them but my sock drawer is full and her need is greater.

I did also manage a hat this week. It’s Tychus again in a mixture of handspun yarns. One runs green-purple-grey and that was my first attempt at carding a three colour gradient. I wanted to see whether I could diz the batt off in one piece in a reasonable time and whether it spun into the yarn that I thought it would. The other is something that was sold to me as Whitefaced Woodland but wasn’t, it was very soft and wrong for the breed. I can’t sell it so it had to stop home and be play yarn. I need to catch up with some stashbashing this month because I bought a 500g cone of black yarn for the piano scarves and then immediately stopped knitting. The hat weighs 114g and there’s a chance that I’ll weigh in a piano scarf before the end of the month so I might yet end up level.

I’m still playing with colour changes. This yarn is Black Welsh Mountain, Manx Loaghtan and grey falkland. As it doesn’t have white in it that means that it would work with white as a contrast colour. My plan for this (if I had a loom free) would be to weave it in a nice simple log cabin with some white falkland. It’s not all shades of grey this week, I’m having an experiment with superwash and sparkle for socks. The main question was whether I could handle slippery superwash successfully because it wasn’t not going to behave the same way as nice grippy wool-from-sheep, it doesn’t hang together in the same way and I thought that it would be more difficult to diz off in one piece. It appears that I’m up to the job after all as exhibit A proves that I can take it off in one length and I have witnesses to the fact that there was no swearing involved.

I’ve been busy non stop all week but I don’t have a lot to show for it. Well, I do in that I have some sparkling windows, cobweb free ceilings and a few shiny door frames but spring cleaning is not exactly the most exciting subject matter for a blog post. It seems that everything woolly I do have to show is black, white or the colours in between.

I did warp the loom, I had to do it in the end as it was stubbornly refusing to thread itself. You don’t have to be a weaver to spot one of my errors in this picture because the two white threads showing in among the black are so obviously wrong. There’s another mistake – the gap in the middle is down to a crossed pair of threads, that one is more obvious if you peer in from the side. When it’s threaded properly I can weave a layer of black fabric and a separate layer of white which on the face of it doesn’t sound particularly thrilling as a project. In reality it is totally enthralling. Maybe doubleweave gets old after a while but I haven’t done enough of it yet for it to have lost its magic. It looks to be plain black but sometimes I’m weaving with white on the sneaky underneath layer. This bit doesn’t have to be exciting, its future is to be folded inwards and sewn because it’s a hem.

Once the layers start interchanging then the black and white layers resolve themselves into a piano keyboard. I’m working my way down from the top, four keys done and eighty four to go. The plan is that the first piece is a scarf for the piano teacher then I change the sett (knitting equivalent – change to smaller needles) and weave a piece of stiffer fabric that will become part of a cover for the digital piano. I’m not entirely sure how the wool I’m using will behave for the second piece at 15 epi, so far I’ve woven it at 10 and 12 for plain weave but I’ll look at that when the time comes. If I end up weaving it all at 12 epi it’s no big deal although the fabric keyboard will be bigger than the real one and I won’t need all eighty eight keys. The draft is from the December 2011 issue of Handwoven but I’m using different yarn and a different sett.

It’s not all black and white, I also have shades of grey. This is the other rabbit hole I fell down, if I hadn’t have run out of natural coloured wool after the second batch then there would have been no spring cleaning done this week because I would have spent every waking minute fastened to the carder or the wheel. I love these, natural sheep colours of black welsh at one end moving through grey falkland or shetland into white falkland. There’s some overlap between the colours so there’s not a clearly defined change between the three shades. If I had a loom free I would have woven it into a scarf that changed colour across the width and the length but I don’t so it will have to wait. When I made it I could think of so many things to do with the yarn, mittens, a multidirectional scarf or knitted alongside a mustard or red in a simple stranded pattern. That was last week though, this week I’m seeing it with a single colour change along the length, spun fine and knitted into a triangular shawl. The double knit yarn is so last week, so Etsy it is.

The postman has brought me a big batch of naturally coloured wool so between the carder, the wheel, the loom and spring cleaning I have a full couple of weeks ahead. The wool may not be colourful but it’s fun. The cleaning is not so fun but it needs to be done and if I keep slipping a bit in between the fun stuff it doesn’t seem so much of a chore. No, that didn’t sound convincing to me either.

I think I may be starting my summer knitting slump even though it’s still the right weather for hats and gloves and I’m wearing socks every day. Nothing in my five page queue of projects really grabs me, there’s nothing that’s shouting “knit me now”, not even anything that is whispering “hello”. I’m not worried about this because I know it will pass and in the meantime there’s always lace to be knitted and given away.

I do have some non-wool interests although admittedly probably not as many as a well rounded individual should demonstrate. Exhibit A is my husband’s birthday cake from earlier in the week, there’s a fruit cake hiding under the icing that’s been maturing in greaseproof paper for the last two months. The little man would have been hammering the letters into place if we could have found a hammer, as it was a wrench had to do. I also found the time to use up some of the egg whites from the freezer and the first rhubarb from the garden by making some friands. The recipe would have you put some of the rhubarb in the middle and a bit on top which sounds delicious. The little problem with that is that the fruit layer made a fault line through the middle so when I turned them out the bottom part stuck in the pan. I had three whole friands out of the tray of eight, I won’t be doing that again. (Yes, I had brushed the tin with melted butter and yes, I did leave them to set a while in the tin before I attempted to get them out)

The purple and grey wool from last time spun itself and then threw itself onto the loom. I dyed the sock yarn that was left over from the run of baby jackets, it ended up a lovely rich aubergine with subtle shading that you can’t see now. It would have looked lovely as socks though and I’m telling myself that I can always make more. Some of the light part of the scarf is grey, some light purple and some purple/grey, the shrieking gold is happily not much in evidence. In a good light the light grey trilobal nylon makes the yarn look metallic silver but you’ll have to take my word for that because it’s raining and good light is in short supply. There is plenty of the pale yarn left for another scarf but very little of the sock yarn so the leftovers are going in the leftover bag and I’ve moved on to something else.

The something else is black and white and is currently stubbornly refusing to thread itself. I’ve counted out the heddles ready to go and I’m waiting to walk past it and find it sitting there, done. At some point I’ll pull up a chair and a cup of tea and see how many I can thread before I get so bored that I mess up counting to four.

My self imposed mission was to get through 2012g of unloved odd ball yarn before November. I didn’t know whether that was an achievable target, it sounded a lot but 180g a month sounded more realistic. That shows if you’re planning to eat an elephant you first need to cut it into bite sized chunks. I can say now that it was an easy target to meet because I’ve hit it by April. All I have to do for the rest of the year is move more out than I buy.

This was the key to my success, when you make a single item that weighs 913g then it goes a long way towards the goal. The sharp eyed may notice that it’s not entirely finished but it’s in use so I’m counting it. I used all of a cone of brown/green yarn, part of a cone of gold and nearly all of the mountain of alpaca/bfl that I spun three years ago. Using the alpaca has left a noticeable gap in the bottom wool box, it’s very pleasing to see. I made this as a single length, cut it into three and sewed it back together again with what my machine calls “patchwork stitch”. If you do it by hand then I think it would be baseball stitch and I’m fairly certain that if I did it by hand then it would never get done.

The brown/gold mix changes across the width, my grand plan was that the warp ran from mostly brown to mostly gold and then back to mostly brown again. That would probably have worked better if I’d made this in four sections rather than three, as it is there are not enough of the changes for it to show as a pattern. It was sett at seven ends per inch except for the experimental section where I went with six. I can’t tell the difference now, going with six overall would have made life easier because it was a six dent reed. The reason that it’s not really finished yet is the end. I didn’t want a hem because this is very thick fabric and I thought a triple thickness edge would be too bulky so I decided to pretend that it’s a quilt and bind the ends with double fold cotton fabric. When I had this idea I had the perfect fabric in mind that had the advantages of being easily accessible and of decent yardage. It was a pity that the reality was that it was easily accessible, very long and totally the wrong colour so now I need a good poke through the quilting stash to audition alternatives. The ends are secure for now, just not very pretty.

I’ve also seen off one ball of Kureyon and reduced some other aran weight yarn. I made dozens of these hats back in my last stash reduction attempt of 2007, it’s Tychus from Knitty and this could possibly be my favourite hat pattern. It’s garter stitch so it stretches to fit all size heads, it’s knitted on the same needles throughout and if you start with a provisional cast on over a circular needle it’s a simple three needle bind off to close what should be the seam. If you watch what you are doing you might even remember to do the bind off with the right sides together, unlike me. I add two stitches to the depth and make four wedges instead of five and it turns out a lovely hat every time. The four hats weighed 235g and took a couple of evenings to knit so again that shows that 180g a month is not a huge accomplishment.

I could decide to up my target to something more challenging or I could sit back and rest on my laurels. Having given it a bit of thought I’m going to keep track of the ins and outs for the rest of the year and look at doing the same thing again next year but maybe with a higher target figure. I’ve spent a solid four months on stash reduction knitting and I think I’m overdue some time off.

There would have been more things finished if the weather had held out but it’s been a very wet week with no chance of getting a blanket dried between showers. The smell of wet alpaca does nothing for me so I don’t want the blanket touching water until there’s a good chance of getting it dry in the day. Fortunately small baby clothes dry fast and don’t smell.

This was the second one knitted but the first one finished. That’s partly down to the lack of sleeve seams but also because I didn’t have any knitting origami to cope with. I love this beyond reason, it takes one ball of sock yarn (anything beyond the 12-18m size would run you into a second) and a bit of undyed and it’s just so cute. This is Drops 13-18, the original is all in one colour but I saw one on Ravelry that had the yoke in a different colour and I thought that looked more interesting. The coloured yarn is Knit Picks Felici, not in its original colour (red) but with a touch of navy dye. The collar was supposed to have a crochet trim but mine looked like it had been made by someone who hadn’t touched a hook in thirty years so I ripped it in favour of a knitted picot edge. I like it and I’d knit another but next time I’d try harder to get the buttonholes in the right place. I had a few grams of coloured yarn left over after knitting the 12-18m size, not enough to have knitted another repeat on the body so certainly not enough to have knitted the next size up.

This sweater was finished first but spent longer in the bag waiting for sewing up. This is Drops 19-3 made from the green section of the sock leftover bag and yet more of the undyed sock yarn. I’d opted to knit the sleeves flat to avoid the jog on the colour changes so that lead to a bit more work and with it being knitted from odd bits of leftover sock yarn there were quite a few ends to sew in. The thing that really took the time was not the sewing up but working out how to hammer the raglan together. I understood that the band with the buttonholes went on top of the other band but then I seemed to have several options for closing up the gap at the bottom. If you’ve knitted something similar before then it’s probably obvious, if you’re starting from a position of complete ignorance then the instructions don’t help much.

I’ve been busy carding, combing and dyeing, the carding and combing has been spectacularly monochrome and boring but some of the dyeing was pretty. Some wasn’t, I like to leave some white in the fibre because providing it’s in short sections it doesn’t spin to white but to light and it gives tonal variation to the yarn. This is a 70/30 blend of superwash merino and bright trilobal nylon, it would be good for socks because the nylon adds some strength to the merino. The light wasn’t the issue with this, the gold splodges were the unwanted element. I know that yellow dye takes an age to dissolve so I don’t know what I was thinking when I poured the dye on without giving the yellow enough time to do its thing. I don’t have a section in the shop marked “dyer’s accidents” so this one had to stay home. Oh dear, what a shame, never mind.

Weaving is the thing that’s not happening at the moment. I want to weave everything, all at once and weaving doesn’t work that way. You start one thing and then you have to finish it before you start the next unless you’re willing to take the scissors to it. Indecisive knitters can cast on a dozen new projects and rip those that fall by the wayside. If you can’t decide which project to knit first just start all of them. I suspect that the serial nature of weaving is going to be good for me in some character building way but at the moment the loom is sitting empty while I work out what it is that I want to do the most from a shortlist of dozens.

My inner knitter strikes again. She’s not right all the time but she’s right often enough for me to know that I ignore her at my peril. The voice of experience was sitting with me as I started knitting the next baby jacket and she soon started pointing out how very long the rows were. There’s minimal shaping up to the yoke, all of sixteen stitches, so those rows are going to continue to be very long. The long rows were eating up the yarn and she who knows these things began to mutter that we were going to run out of yarn before we reached the yoke.

At that point I did what any reasonable person would do, had another look at the pattern, swore and cast on a sleeve. The pattern says I’ll need 150g of sock yarn for this and I only have 100g. I didn’t see this as a problem because I was always intending to make the yoke in white and I was estimating the yoke to be about a third of the knitting so I’d thought that 100g of coloured yarn would  be about enough. My inner knitter didn’t think this reasoning was anything like good enough so she made me knit a sleeve to work out just how much yarn I’ll use. I still have 3cm to knit on the sleeve so the numbers are subject to revision but it looks like I’ll use 40g on the sleeves leaving 60g for the body. I have an extra 10cm left to knit on the body, which is about 35 rows and a row uses 0.65g of yarn. I weighed all the yarn I have left, 48g, and assuming I do get one sleeve out of 20g then I’ll finish with 5g of yarn to spare. That won’t be enough for the crochet trim but I’ll live with that, I’m sure I have some pink sock yarn around somewhere.

Is she convinced? Nope, she wants a recount after the first sleeve is really finished. It’s not the end of the world if I run out a few rows short of the yoke, all I need to do is to knit both sleeves first and then if necessary start with the white a little early on the body. It would be nice to get it out of a single ball but I’m not ripping it back to reknit in the smaller size so I’ll just have to see how it goes.

The alpaca blanket is off the loom and sitting in a big heap waiting for the weather to pick up. It’s going to take a lot of drying and I don’t want a house smelling of wet alpaca so it is waiting for a good drying day. The forecast is for rain all week so it could be waiting a while. I ran out of warp before I ran out of weft which is good in a way but means that I could have made it longer. I still don’t know whether it is long enough, it’s going to lose inches in the wash so I won’t get a final measurement until it’s dry. It is either long enough or it isn’t, there’s nothing I can do about it now.

The green and white baby sweater is off the needles sitting in a small heap waiting for me to block it and finish it off. That might be waiting a while too, two sleeve seams and a few ends to sew in won’t take long to do but could take weeks to get to. Sewing up is never as inviting as knitting, especially when it’s edge of the seat running-out-of-yarn knitting. Tune in next week to find out whether I reached the yoke before I reached the end of the yarn.

PS – the blog is going through a bit of a revamp, it has this really lovely header but for some reason that bit keeps vanishing. Bear with me during the renovation works.

There’s no uncertainty about this one, it is really finished, buttons and all. Despite being knitted on 2.75mm needles I would probably make it again, it made a good use of 88g of pink scraps and I like it. This could be down to the combination of garter and no sewing up, a double winner in my book. The only change I made to the pattern was to add the new stitches for the sleeve with a provisional cast on so that I could close the sleeve seam with a three needle bind off. It’s Drops b14-27 in leftover sock yarn and undyed sock yarn. I don’t think I have enough pinks left to make another but I’m sure that if I rummage though the leftover bag I could find some scraps that could be made pink. The only thing I thought was less than stellar was the pick up and decrease around the neck, I can see the line and although I can see why it’s needed I still don’t like it.

The scraps from these are the front runners for the dye bath. The yarn will probably come out pink and brown but that’s a combination that will work. These are some variety of Opal cotton, I won’t apologise for losing the ball band because it didn’t have one when I bought it. They are the standard mother-sock over 64 stitches with a short row heel. I took one with me to a craft fair and now I can say that I can knit a complete sock in five hours, it’s just a pity that it was a six hour craft fair. Another time I’ll know that a single sock is not enough knitting for a full day out.

This is the yes/no/maybe project of the title. The weft is a two ply alpaca and bfl mix that I spun in April 2009 for a blanket for the settee. I was convinced that I made ten skeins but when I came to sit down and plan the weaving I could only find nine and that wasn’t enough. I shelved the idea and then later found a solitary skein when I was having a clearout behind a drawer that refused to shut. When I came to dust off the plan again I still had nine skeins. I don’t know whether the one I found was one of the original nine rather than the missing tenth or whether I’ve put the tenth in a safe place and effectively lost it all over again. It’s possible that I only ever had nine and just remembered that I had ten. Who knows? After three years it is time to accept that there is never going to be a tenth skein and just get on with using what I have. I used up all of a cone of marled brown in the warp, I’d like to have been able to use that on its own but there wasn’t anywhere near enough so I came up with a cunning plan involving a cone of gold. By my rough calculations I don’t have enough of the alpaca weft but it’s handspun and it’s a bit irregular and there’s a chance that there might just be enough to get the length that I want. Maybe.

I’ve started and I’ll see how far these nine skeins take me. I’m three skeins in now and I estimate I’ll get a woven length of 7′ 2″ (three times that length really but the blanket will be three strips wide) which is probably going to be long enough after washing. Not all the skeins are the same length, if I picked up small ones so far then I’m underestimating, if I picked big ones then I’ll run short. When I’m done I’ll have used up nine skeins of three year old yarn and finished an odd cone of brown so even if it comes up short for what I want it for it’s still a win.

Pink knitting is on hold until I’ve come up with some more pink scraps so I’ve moved on to the bag of green bits from the sock scraps bag. This is another Drops baby pattern, b19-3. The sleeves are supposed to be knitted in the round but I didn’t feel that I made a good job of the colour changes on Minni’s sleeves so I opted for knitting flat which had the added advantage of not having to look out a set of dpns in the right size. I will no doubt regret this when it comes to sewing seams that I need not have made but at the time it seemed like the right choice. I’ve knitted two sleeves so this project is now a “yes” rather than a “maybe” because I’m past the point where I might have thought about ripping it. If I’m lucky I might even have enough green yarn to finish it.

There are no socks today, none finished, none on the needles. I foretold that correctly although I was completely wrong in predicting that there would be no sock yarn and no dpns.

The dpns in use this week weren’t sock sized, they were massive great chunks of metal. I’ve been knitting a lot of sock yarn recently and as a result 4.5mm needles feel huge. It seems like a long time since I knitted a hat, it was certainly long enough ago for me to have forgotten what the decrease rate should be and as a result I knitted the top of this twice. I knitted the bottom of it twice as well because I carefully calculated and wrote down 105 and then went on to cast on 115 stitches. The difference only became apparent when I came to start the patterning and had ten stitches left over at the end of the row. I know exactly where I went wrong, underneath where I had written “105″ was a “+15″ which is the number of stitches I added to the chart to size it up for an adult head. I looked down, saw a number I recognised and then went back to watching the tv. There’s a lesson there for someone, probably not for me because I’m destined to repeat that one over and over again.

The pattern is written for a child and I’d hoped that using thicker yarn and bigger needles would be enough for it to turn out adult sized. When that fantasy failed I experimented with even bigger needles and the yarn held double but that didn’t work either and I was left to do what I should have done at the start – knit a tension square, work out my tension and calculate the number of stitches I needed for an average sized adult head. My tension issues mean that I don’t love it but as it has already left the house and I’ll never see again it doesn’t really matter. It looks like R2D2 and it fits me (I assume I have a standard sized adult head), job done, tick that box, move on.

I had various setbacks on the hat and the only way I saw it through the knit-rip cycle was to have a reward system. I’d finished one front and a sleeve on this before I finished sewing all the ends in on the hat, I can now knit on this without guilt, rather than knitting my ration of three white stripes before returning to the hat. This is DROPS b14-27, I have knitted it before but then I got as far as the sleeve before regretting my colour choices and ripping it all back. This time I’m using pinks from the sock scrap bag with undyed sock yarn as the contrast. I’m just over two thirds around it and I think I have enough of the smaller balls to see me to the centre back. If not then the back may turn out to have less colour changes than the front which isn’t the end of the world, just the end of several small balls of yarn.

When I get to the mid point I start knitting this magic ball, as I’ve been going along I’ve split my yarns into two equal lengths, knitted with one and wound the other onto one ball. When I start the second half I’ll pick up the ball and all my yarns will be there in the right order to knit around to the front. I have a separate ball for the second sleeve, in a bag marked “sleeve” as I’ve already seen the one way that I can mess this up. There was another route to failure that I briefly explored when I came to wind the next colour onto the magic ball only to find that it had magically vanished. Disaster (aka non-matching fronts) was averted when I found it under the back of the settee.

It’s an ideal brainless knitting project, I have a plain run of 13.75″ of two colour, short row garter until the next sleeve. This gives me an ideal opportunity to plan the next project for the loom, I’m at the stage that starts “if I make three panels 20″ wide, each one two yards long” and hope soon to get to the point where I rummage through the bottom layers of the stash to pull out yarn for stripes.

It is possible to have too much of a good thing, I’m done with sock yarn this week. I’m packing the dpns away because I’ve had enough of round and round knitting for a while. I’m through with coasters too because this warp went on forever and I was done with it when there were still yards to go. I thought it was a good idea to raid the sock scrap bag for little bits of wool to make warp faced mug rugs but I neglected to think about the amount of hemstitching involved. There’s a bit of hemstitching at the start, you weave four inches and then hemstitch again. It was all stop-start and not the quick fun project that I’d imagined.

These were speedy socks because there’s a birthday deadline later this week. I was asked if I could make a pair of socks just like Dad’s, with fish on the toes. Well of course I can and even better I can make them entirely from the scrap bag because there isn’t a need for them to be solid black where they show. There are four balls of different greys in the cuffs and the sea is left over from making the original pair. The slightly worrying thing is that these are the same size as the socks I make for his father other than being four rounds shorter in the foot. I reworked the wave and this time I added the fish afterwards with duplicate stitch. I think it’s a better solution for a small motif than intarsia in the round. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

The next question from the junior sock wearer was whether I could make a pair of socks exactly like the ones he was wearing but longer. Further questionning revealed that this pair no longer fitted because of the whole growing thing that he has going on with his feet. I originally had two balls of this yarn which seems to have escaped notice on the blog and in my Ravelry projects. I made one pair of socks for child feet and one pair for man feet but of course the child feet have since grown to man foot size. The additional stripe is screamingly obvious now but the edge will soften after a few washes.

After that I turned to fixing up some socks for me. I had three pairs in the mending pile, all with the same hole in the toe so new toes were in order. With the green pair I tried the Bosnian toe from the Crystal sockettes in the latest issue of Knitty. The toe starts with a little rectangle of fabric and is knitted upwards which was the opposite direction to my socks so needed to be grafted on. After that I applied some thought and developed a cuff down Bosnian toe so as to avoid the grafting. With 12g of yarn and a little effort that made two pairs of socks returned to active service. I’d had enough of sock needles by the time I got to the third pair of holey toes, they will have to wait for another time. Sandal season is coming up, I won’t be washing many pairs of my socks between now and October so one less pair in the drawer won’t matter.

I haven’t a clue what the next post will be about but I can guarentee that it won’t be socks.

It didn’t take me long to knit the last icord but it did take me four days to fasten it on. If I’d been following the directions then I should have made all the icord before I cast on but I just couldn’t face it. As it turned out the extra few days between casting off and finishing this has been a good thing. It’s given me the chance to forget how much I dislike purling on dpns (I’d much rather seam a sleeve) and enough time to work through my thoughts on garter edging vs rolled stockinette. I like it more now than I did a week ago, although not enough to want to knit it again.

The back was what I bought the pattern for, that little short row section with the belt really set it apart. It’s a pity then that I fell out of love with the belt, if I was knitting it again I’d knit the belt after I’d finished the back so I could make it exactly the right length. As it was I knitted it, fastened it on, took it off and lengthened it by half an inch. I’m still not convinced that it’s the perfect length but it’s better than it was and good enough will do.

I’m coming around to liking the rolled stockinette edging although my initial thought was to substitute a bit of garter. It does look surprisingly like icord and it looks good from both sides. I’m not a total convert but I’ll at least consider using it again in the future. Another time I’d omit the design feature of the purl bumps, I’d prefer a solid colour change because the dotted line just looks wrong to me. That line of crochet at the bottom was worth the effort, in reality it’s there to hide any tension issues where the colours change. My knitting looked fine without it but better with it.

If it’s a well written pattern with interesting little finishing touches then why would I not want to knit it again? I think it’s mostly because of the gauge, it’s knitted at eight stitches to the inch and I know that I can make a respectable fabric with sock yarn at seven stitches to the inch. It felt like a major piece of knitting rather than a bit of fun and I think that goes back to the needle size. I like the look of the white hem and the way that it’s formed as you go is very clever but I don’t want to knit that again. As I was knitting it I was wondering if anyone would have seen the difference if I’d made it later and sewed it on. Now I’ve added that line of crochet I suspect that I could have sewn it on in black and no-one would notice.

I still have a bag of green sock scraps. I saw the end of one ball of leftovers but all of the rest of the balls just got smaller. I don’t think there’s enough to knit another one but that doesn’t matter seeing as I’m not knitting another one.