Hindsight is 20/20

I suffered an early setback in the Ravelympics on day two when I had to frog all work completed to that point and start again. With a different pattern.

The pattern I started of with had a sweet little twisted stitch cable detail. Fun to work and (in theory) a nice non-fussy accent for a boy sock. It was all printed off and laid out with the yarn ready to go on Friday. Unfortunately it soon became clear that this yarn and this pattern were not meant to be together.

The Alpaca Fine is soft and lovely to be sure, but it is soft and lovely because it is somewhat loosely spun and has a very slight halo. And the main colour for this project, Blueberry, is also lovely but is a dark, light-sucking blue. The result, completely unsurprisingly to everyone with an ounce of sense (but not me), is that the sweet little twisted stitch detail was lost completely and the rest of the sock was looking a little floppy.

I slept on it Friday night (not literally because: pointy!) and in the light of the morning knew I had to rip. Fortunately I was only a few inches in. Needing a new pattern quickly I did what I should have done in the first place (ah, hindsight) and dug out my Nancy Bush books and choose a nice simple-but-interesting ribbed pattern. A solid weekend of knitting and I'm back on track.


Since speed is of the essence I've gone back to aluminium needles for these socks. I actually started the ill-fated pattern on some Inox double points I picked up last month. The Inoxes are steel, which is wonderfully smooth and pointy but (since the laws of physics apparently still apply) WAY heavier that aluminium. They'd be manageable for a nice hard spun wool being worked tightly but they just weren't playing well with this yarn and I feared that I would be courting hand pain with the marathon sessions the Ravelympics demand.

So far today real life has interfered cruelly with knitting time, but I think that if I can finish the leg and knit the heel flap by Wednesday morning I might be able to have sock 1 done by the end of the week. Knit knit knit.