Once Upon a Sock: Droving

Phew, is it really December?

It’s the first Thursday of the month, so time to talk about some socks!

I’ve finally finished one of my Droving socks! I’m not quite sure why the first one took me so long (a whole month!) I was partially distracted by other projects. I’m also just not used to doing colorwork like this, where you can’t easily memorize what you’re doing or “read” what’s coming next by looking at your knitting, since it’s a picture rather than repeating motif. I had to pay very close attention to my chart, which meant it wasn’t great TV knitting – and most of my knitting happens at night while watching Netflix!

Despite it taking awhile, I have enjoyed knitting the first sock (and have some hopes of the second one going faster).  The pattern is very well done. My stranding still needs to be improved, but it’s getting better. I got pretty efficient at trapping floats using this great tutorial. And there’s something very satisfying about watching these little sheep emerge!

The colors are for some reason a bit hard to capture, but I think the contrast is more striking in person. Hopefully, I’ll sail quickly through the next one and can show you some blocked, modeled shots soon – they look much less wonky on my foot, and I’m hopeful that a nice trip to the bath will even out some of my stranding missteps!  I’m a Continental knitter normally, so for stranding, I hold a yarn in each hand. I think I might try holding them both in my left hand for the second sock — we’ll see.

There’s a little group of us that write about sock knitting on the first Thursday that includes Maggie at Project(s) in Progress and Paula at Spin a Yarn. And if you’d like to link up, just let one of us know!