Our latest sock sample is totally glorious!
I used our new exclusive yarn from My Mama Knits. It's inspired by the Pom Pom Tree that sits in our Pittenweem shop window.
Sunshine has used her Choufunga 4ply yarn (75% merino and 25% nylon) and created two 'colours'.
There's a 100g hank called Pom Pom Tree and a mini skein pack of 6 colours called Pom Pom Party. Each mini skein is 20g/85m.
I used the mini skein pack for the sock.
I used my usual basic sock pattern - My Favorite Vanilla Socks by Meaghan Schmaltz. It's written for the Magic Loop method but it's easy to use for however you knit your top down socks.
I especially like the heel flap - adding garter stitch up the side makes it very neat.
You can use any sock pattern you like for this. I prefer to keep it plain and simple and allow the colours to shine.
I striped the cuff but kept the heel and toes one colour.
I randomly striped the rest, varying the height of the rows.
Now you're probably thinking, "that's a lot of ends Fiona" and I'm not going to lie: it is a lot of ends.
Scroll past if you hate ends.
The eagle eyed will notice I used two different techniques in dealing with these ends.
On the leg of the sock I used Summer Lee Knits technique of knitting in your ends as you go - catching the ends at the end of the previous row and at the beginning of a new row whenever a new colour is introduced. She has a YouTube video here. Once you've finished the sock you can pull those ends to neaten and tighten up the join and then you trim the ends.
On the foot of the sock I did it my usual way - simply start knitting with the new colour and weave in all the ends at the end.
I do prefer this second method. For me it gives a neater join but you might get a different effect. I have quite a loose knitting style and sometimes things don't work so well for me.
Also, when 'knitting the ends in as you go' you need to remember to do it at the end of the previous row. I usually forgot!
When striping a sock I find washing and drying it on a sock blocker really helps to even out the joins.
This is the sock on the join side before blocking.
And the sock after a soak in Eucalan and dried on a sock blocker.
The foot section really is much neater.
Oh. I also didn't bother trying to fix/hide the jogs at the beginning of the rounds.
When you knit in the round you are really knitting a spiral. So with a new round you have a step up. There are various ways to conceal this. You can see an easy method here.
And obviously you don't need to stripe it like I did. You could do big blocks of colour instead and have fewer ends to weave in. If you do decide to stripe and want matching socks... take a note of your colour sequence as you go.
Or you could use the companion hank of Pom Pom Tree for the main part of the sock and only use the mini skeins for cuffs, heels and toes.
As the Pom Pom Party mini skein pack has 120g of yarn you could get 2 pairs of socks from one pack! I usually only use about 60g for a pair of size 6.5 socks.
