Monday, May 7, 2007

Breathe and Relax --Done!

Pattern: Relax and Breathe from Knit Socks! by Betsy McCarthy
Yarn: Plymouth Yarn Encore D.K. in 4 colors (217-black, 1383-orange, 3335-green, 517-blue)
75% Acrylic, 25% wool

Needles: US size 2 (2.75 mm)
Began: April 20, 2007;
Finished: May 3, 2007 at around 6 pm


Woo
Hoo! I am finished with the Breathe, Relax socks and they have been happily tried on, modeled, and approved of by TL. He didn't want to try them on until I got the ends worked in, but I guess that's alright. As you can probably tell, his actual feet fit into the actual socks (whew!) and he seems to enjoy them.

If you look closely, you can see that the heels and the turning of the heels are two different colors. Getting tired one evening, I did try to convince TL that both of these areas could be either the same color as the body of the sock (highest hope) or at least be the same color as one another. But there was no negotiating, I should have known not to show him the photo in the book. Lesson learned! You can probably also make out most of the words, I didn't want to post more than two photos of the same socks, just to prove that I spelled both words correctly on each sock. You'll have to trust me.

The banding was kind of fun to do, but I was worried that I would increase the tension too much and make it pucker, but that didn't happen. I did knit Continental style and English style at the same time on those areas in order to even out the tension when changing color, and to be more efficient. I did end up regularly making the stitches face the wrong way from the yarn in the left hand, but it got a lot better with practice and not knitting late at night. I simply turned those stitches the right way as I went along the next row, so it wasn't disastrous.

3 comments:

WK said...

Those socks are great! I am really impressed. Fancy designs, spelling correctly, proper tension, proper fit, knitting with yarn in each hand -- very impressive. I'm so glad TL likes them. Hopefully his feet won't grow too quickly

Jay Queue said...

Thanks for being impressed! I showed them to a couple of "regular" people who, of course, did not really get how hard they were. Everyone thought they were nice and all that, but ...

I was really tempted to photograph the insides of the socks, to show that they are also fairly neat, given the amount of color changes and end sew-ins. But decided against it.

I'm nervous that TL is about to undergo a growth spurt. He was on a "big eating" phase two weeks ago, and these are usually followed by spurts of growth. TL got a larger size shoe not that long ago, so I'm hoping his feet are "safe."

Anonymous said...

I am so jealous of those socks.
You could sell them on Etsy for big $$$.