Feather-and-Fan Socks

The working of these socks is a long, complicated story. In previous socks I’d knitted, cuff-down, I was plagued by either running out of yarn right at the end, or, with so much left over that I wished I had made the leg longer. So, I wanted to try a toe-up pair. I started out with a pattern I found on Knitty.com, with a lovely traveling-vine type of lace pattern and a short-row heel. Once I had a few inches of foot, I decided they were going to be very baggy. So I ripped out and reworked the lace pattern to have more stitches per repeat. As I tried them on, they seemed to fit sleekly and looked lovely. However, a few inches up the leg, I discovered the whole thing was too small and I couldn’t even pull the sock over my heel. At this point, I took a long break from working on this project!

Looking through a library book, I found a lovely, simple, feather-and-fan lace sock. I decided to completely rip out the vine-socks rather than ripping out to just before the heel to try a different heel style since that would have been most of the sock anyway, and I wasn’t totally happy with how the varigated yarn was working anyway.

I worked the socks as shown in the pattern, except from the toe up. This worked out fine, and I like the garter-stitch rows at the ankle and cuff.

I really like the feather-and-fan stitch design. It’s enough detail to look pretty but the yarn is a bit busy so the two don’t fight. Also it goes quickly because only every 4th row is pattern, the rest is all knit.

I did have some sizing issues with these socks as I was working them. I worked the heel-flap twice because the gauge seemed looser once I switched to knitting back and forth as opposed to in-the-round, and I wanted the bottom of the heel to be tight and smooth and durable! So I ripped back and re-knit with size 0’s.

Then, when I was a few inches up the leg, I was horrified to see that again it was going to be difficult to get the sock on my foot, but I didn’t panic – I ripped back to those garter stitch rows and started the leg using size 2’s.

The whole reason that I knit these toe-up was so that I could use all of the yarn. It was looking like that was going to mean knee socks, which I was delighted with, since knee socks are my stay-warm-in-a-cold-house strategy and I wear knee socks every day from October to April. But, the socks weren’t going to go over my calves. I was toying with the idea of adding stitches to each of 4 pattern repeats, but wasn’t sure how to do it gradually and was afraid it would be too many additional stitches. Luckily, it was Monday and I was at the Knit Night at Market of Choice. Several experts there advised me to insert a new repeat at the center back, adding stitches gradually. This totally worked! I added 2 sts on every “round 3” of the pattern, and worked the “round 1” pattern as new number of stitches allowed. Saved!

I’m quite relieved to have this project done! It’s been a long time coming.