the Soxophone Player

I found this pair of toe-up knee socks, Gothic Temptress, designed by Janine Le Cras – while trolling around on Ravelry.

I don’t have the pattern, but adapted my own version inspired by the photo.

I began with a pico edge mock rib hem top, and then knit a straight forward knee sock, with the exception of making a series of eyelets down the back of the sock for the ribbon.

For each eyelet I  moved a single stitch onto its neighbouring needle, as you would do making a pico edge. That skips the stitch on the first pass, but knits it on the subsequent pass, leaving the hole – or eyelet.

I like to keep things simple, so I used the two yellow hash marks (on the cylinder for the heel) as my reference points for the eyelets, and I made them every 10 rows from about an inch under the hem top down to the pre-heel.

This pair is size Medium, knit with the 72 needle cylinder on the Verdun 47.  At the pre-heel I switched from stockinette to 3:1 mock ribbing for the top of the foot, until the last 5 rows, when I repaced those needles (to facilitate easier Kitchener stitching).

I didn’t have enough ribbon to lace both socks – but here’s one. (That’s just shy of 3 meters of ribbon!)

DW couldn’t find her steel spiked red stilettos, so we had to make do without ;o(

Time for another ‘special project’: Thigh High stockings in a fine stripe pattern. I call them Baroque Thigh Highs.

For this pair of socks I am using Fortissima Socka from stash:

• 3 x 50g balls of Black #1002
• 1 x 100g ball of #2057 mittelgrau meliert
• 1 x 100 g ball of #2055 grau-meliert (the lighter of the two greys in the photo)

This may seem like a LOT of yarn for one pair of socks.

It is.

My pattern is quite inefficient: my actual use of yarn was 110 grams of black, and 51 grams of each of the two greys for a pair of size Medium +.  I’ll be making several pairs in several sizes, so its no matter, but if I were making only one pair I’d surely fiddle with the pattern to sneak back the greys to 50g!

I knit these M+ thigh highs on two cylinders. I started the tops on the 100 needle cylinder in a 9:1 mock rib at quite a loose tension. After the hem top, with needles replaced, I knit 100 needles in stockinette for three repeats of my colour pattern: 5 rows middle grey, 5 rows lighter grey, 5 rows black. Then I knit some scrap yarn and run the topper off the cylinder and rehang it on the 72 needle cylinder.

To rehang 100 stitches onto 72 needles I put every third and fourth stitch on every third needle, and in addition I hang an extra stitch on the first of three needles at 12 o’clock, 9 o’clock, and 6 o’clock.  That evenly spreads the 100 stitches.

The pattern is based on my earlier Thigh Highs pattern, except I adapted to make 5 row stripes with three colours instead of 15 rows stripes in two colours.

The thin stripes take  a bit longer time, given all the colour changes. And there are serious ends:

How would you accessorize a pair of thigh highs like this?

What a hoot!

I tried another version of socks I’ve been trying to size down beyond small.

On this attempt I am using the same yarn as the earlier version: my own 1 ply 70/30  Wool/Nylon fingering weight, dyed in Reddish Brown. And I am using the 54 needle cylinder and 36 slot ribber dial on the Legare 400.

For this pair I began with a 2 x 1 rib for 25 rows, and then, instead of switching to stockinette went to a 5:1 rib for the leg and top of the foot.

The resulting sock is about 1/4 inch narrower on the leg, and a bit less than that on the foot, as compared to the same yarn/pattern done in stockinette.

I’m not sure if that is ‘enough slimmer’ – will have to have it test driven!

And, since the purpose of the socks if Hiking, I’ll also have to find out if the purl stitches are an irritant.

If I had a 27 slot ribber dial, I would have done a 1:1 topper and 3:1 leg/instep – but I don’t. (Trying to find one.)

And a suggestion from a reader to try using every other slot on the 80 cylinder is worth a try. I don’t have an 80 but I’ve got an 84, so half of that would be 42 stitchs, a good drop down from 54. This would be a reduced size without the purl stitches.

When knitting a project such as Thigh High Socks, I want more stitches on the top part of the sock – the over the knee part – than the ‘regular’ part of the sock.

In the first picture, I’ve knit the top part of a Thigh High on the 100 needle cylinder. I’m using my own 75/25 Wool/Nylon fingering weight yarn (~400 yds/110g) in Jet Black and (separately) Raspberry (which in a lower value dye pot presents as hot pink).

I’ve got an 80 row hem top in an 11:1 mock rib, followed by even stripes in black and pink with all 100 needles in work, and then finished off with scrap yarn and taken off the sock knitter.

To carry on knitting my sock topper – I rehang the stitches from the final row onto the empty needles on the 72 cylinder.

I started and ended the knitting of my topper at the right red hash mark (where I start and end everything) and so the tails of my good yarn and scrap yarn show me where to start hanging stitches on the 72 cylinder. The very last pink stitch (stitch #100) is the one that has the final tail coming from it, so the first stitch  beyond that one is the actual Stitch# 1 -  first stitch of the row.  So….I hang that stitch on the first needle AFTER the red hash mark.

I have to spread the stitches out, since I’m putting 100 onto 72 needles. My simple method for that is to hang every third PLUS fourth stitch on every third needle, while hanging only one stitch on every first and second needle (of every three needles). That all adds up to 97 stitches. So at 12 o’clock, 9 o’clock and 6 o’clock I hang two stitches on the first needle in addition to the two stitches that go on the third needle.  And that ends up with the 100 stitches being evenly hung on 72 needles.

Now I start knitting as if I’m beginning a new sock – with the first stitch beginning immediately after the red hash mark. In this project I will start with black, to carry on my stripe pattern.

There will be a small hole where the first stitch of the new work begins. When finishing the sock, running that final pink tail from the topper through the back loop of the first pink stitch that I hung on the first needle, and then weaving that tail in will close the hole tidily.

The rest of the project is basically knitting a Knee Sock – beginning with a looser tension at knee level and working to a ‘normal’ tension by the time you get to the shin.

When the sock comes off the knitter you still will have the scrap yarn (blue arrow) where the topper joined onto the 72 cylinder. It is simply unraveled/pulled off as you would any scrap yarn. (If you missed hanging one of those 100 stitches…this is when you find out!)

This pair I am working on is size Large.

This rather plain looking pair of socks is a milestone for me.

They are an adaptation of a pattern I tried and walked away from several times over the past few years. I simply didn’t get it. There were knitting terms that were unclear to me as a non hand knitter. I’m fairly sure there were bits of instruction missing that may have been taken for granted a knitter would know. And the pattern was written for a 60 stitch sock which I almost never knit, so I was trying to translate things I didn’t know into a size that wasn’t given.

The original pattern was in an issue of the sock machine newsletter published by Bonnie Smola. It was not included on the CD compilation of patterns that I have referred to in the past. Perhaps the pattern was thought to be too difficult ;o)

But I’ve always said that with a sock machine its important to know when to walk away. And to go back later.

The big(gest) difficulty is that on a sock machine you are working with a fixed number of stitches – you can’t just increase a stitch when there is no slot and needle for it.

So the solution?

Knit the insole separately from the sole of the foot. That way you can knit flat using half of the needles – or more, or less – which allows increasing and decreasing, and then join the top and bottom sections together later, just before doing the toe.

In a nutshell:

Knit the top of the sock and leg in whatever standard method is preferred. When coming to the heel, stop with the yarn carrier at 12 o’clock instead of 6 o’clock, and raise out of work all the needles between the red hash marks on the 6 o’clock side of the machine. This leaves the top half of the needles in work, and it is upon these needles we knit the top of the foot (insole). (And don’t get me started about how for umpteen years I thought the insole was the bottom of the foot – I mean its got the word sole right in it!)

In my sample pair, I’m knitting size Large on the 72 cylinder. So I have 36 needles in action on the top of the machine. Knit back and forth to make as many rows as you would normally do for a foot. I’m using my thinner undyed wool/nylon fingering weight, so 80 rows (40 back, 40 forth). I finish on the left side, cut the yarn leaving a tail, tie on scrap yarn and knit 15 or 20 rows, and then run this work right off the needles and just leave it inside the cylinder. And, then remove all the 36 needles just emptied.

Turning my attention now to the heel – on this pair I’ve done the simpler version of the Eye of the Partridge heel in this pattern: Row 1: Sl1, K1 repeat to end of row; Row 2: Sl1, knit to end. Repeat the pair of rows 18 times for 36 row total, and this will give 18 chain stitches on each side of the heel flap. (This A to B in the photo below.)

To turn the heel – I did the Sl1, K5, Ktog, K to end repeat that until the heel flap has been decreased to 10 stitches remaining, ending with the yarn carrier on the left. (This is B to C in the photo below.)

(The tip given by Pat in the comments of Sl1, K5, K2tog gave me a much tidier chain stitch from the Sl1;s)

Then replace 20 needles on the right side, and pick up all the chain stitches from the side edge of the heel turn and the heel flap (So, the sides of A to C in the photo below). There are more than 20 chain stitches, so spread them evenly – this worked out to hang two, skip one, hang two, skip one etc. This little @#@#@$#&*^ piece of information is what took me three @#@#$@*&^ years to figure out.  I was hanging the first 20 chain stitches and then creatively and disastrously trying to integrate the remaining stitches is all manner of ways!

After knitting across, 20 needles are then placed on the left side, and the chain stitches picked up from that side. Ending with this.

So. Now we are working with 50 needles, and we need to reduce that back down to 36 before as we join the top and bottom of the foot together. This decreasing will form the triangular gussets. That process is basically: 1 row of K2tog, knit to end, Pick up one side stitch from insole. (the needle left over from the K2tog is moved to the other side of the cylinder and used to pick up the insole stitch – so on this row, there is no net change in the number of needles.  The next row is a decrease row – it is a K2tog, K1, K2tog, K to last 4 stitches, K2tog, K2, Pick Up Stitch from insole. Now the first K2tog and the last Pick Up stitch in this row are exactly the same as the first row – shifting the needle emptied with the first K2tog to the opposite side to accommodate the stitch picked up from the side of the insole.  The other two K2tog are decreases that shape the gusset – one on each side – and those two needles we remove from the machine. Recall that in the K2tog we move the remaining needles together to close the gap.

Repeat those two rows over and over until there are 37 needles remaining in work – half of the total needles, plus one. We’ve now completed the gussets, and at the same time those Pick Up sitches at the end of each row were starting to tie in the insole.

Now we join the rest of the insole as we finish knitting the foot. To do this we: K2tog, knit to end, Pick Up stitch from the insole. And we do that until the foot is completed. With each pass (remember we’re going back and forth, not round and round) the K2tog empties one needle, which me move to the opposite side and use for the Picked Up stitch. So we have one needle that we shift back and forth on each pass.

When we run out of stitches on the insole, the foot is complete and we have arrived at the scrap yarn that we knit onto the insole just before we ran it off the machine. So now we replace all the missing needles in the cylinder, and rehang the stitches between the good yarn and the scrap yarn onto the needles.

Knit a toe, and yer dun.

My description of work here isn’t  a complete pattern -  just a rough and dirty outline.

I may tweak some of the details. Like the heel turning, where I decreased to 10 stitches (at C) – I’m not sure that shouldn’t be 12 instead of ten.

And I don’t know that I’ll stick with the ‘knit the entire insole’ thing.  80 rows is a lot of back and forth, and a huge amount of K2tog, and Pick Up – each time a stitch being moved is an opportunity to drop it! I think the insole could be done as a partial flap for just as many rows as it takes for the gusset to be finished in the corresponding rows below it, then once you’re back to a total of 72 stitches, knit the rest of the sock in the round. That would shave a good hour off the work.

I dyed up three batches of my own 75/25 fingering weight wool/nylon in three different values of  washfast acid dye Bright Orange.

And here’s the first pair of socks from this monochrome theme:

These Ginger Snaps are size Large, knit with the 72 cylinder on the Verdun 47.

I experimented with Clox Socks (also known as Clocks) about a year ago, using purl patterns. I wanted to try a different variation, and this is what I ended up with:

This is not my first attempt! But I’m pleased to say that is didn’t take too many.

It took me a while to figure out the cable stitch. (Laurie planted this seed well over a year ago, and I’ve been staring at dpn pictures/diagrams from time to time ever since.) I actually ended up figuring out two different stitches. I used the two together on one of my failed projects and I didn’t like how they turned out, so I went a little simpler with this project, using only one variation.

Here’s a sock looking from the inside:

I worked a pattern 8 stitches wide on both the left and right sides of the sock. You can see my red hash marks on the cylinder which are the exact mid points of each side, and then you can see I used white liquid paper to temporarily mark off 4 stitches in either direction of each red mark.

The first pair and last pair of stitches within the 8 are ribbed on every row of the clock, and the middle 4 stitches are knit stockinette for 6 rows, and then my cable stitch is done on the 7th row. There are 9 repeats in my clox, plus a few rows of the rib just before the first cable, and just after the last cable as a segue.

I don’t know if this stitch has a ‘real name‘ – maybe you dpn-ers can help me out here. I tried to copy some things that were called Cross Left Front and Cross Left Back and Cross-this-and-that. I tell you, my head nearly exploded trying to extrapolate from dpn (ie Greek) into Sock McGeek Speak! In the end I think it does what a cable stitch would do, but I’m not sure if it is structurally similar enough to call it an existing name.

For this version of the stitch:

I knit stitches 1,2,3,4 ‘normally’ and then stopped knitting when I got just past them. (Illustrated by the clear numbered circles in the picture – which you can click to enlarge).

Then, I removed stitch one and two completely off the cylinder.

Then I MOVED sitch 3 and 4 to the place previously occupied by stitch 1 and 2 (while 1 and 2 are still sitting in the inside of the cylinder) and

Then I MOVED stitch 1 and 2, passing behind the newly deposited 3 and 4, and into the spaces originally occupied by 3 and 4. (The new homes of the stitches are shown in the solid numbered circles.)

My other variation of this stitch, no photo, is to remove stitch 3 and 4; move stitch 1 and 2 to the place previously occupied by 3 and 4, then move 3 and 4 across the back and into the place originally taken by 1 and 2.

The socks are knit in my own 75/25 wool/nylon fingering weight, colour Clay, with the 72 needle cylinder on the Verdun 47 CSM. They are (my) size Large.

This is a project that was bound to happen.

I am using my own 75/25 Wool/Nylon fingering weight sock yarn, worsted spun, in Clay (main colour), Mauve (2nd colour including heels and toes), and Mouse Grey (3rd colour). All three colours are hand dyed in a low value to give a more subtle type of presentation.

Here’s is a view of the sock machine looking at ‘argyles in progress’. The clothes pins help keep the leading end of yarn changes from getting too slack. Once that leading end has been knit in for a few stitches, the clothes pin can come off.

When I do my hem tops I always lay the leading edge of the yarn in on the second row of knitting, which eliminated the task of weaving that end in by hand later.  No doubt I can do the same thing with many of the argyle ends, but for now that’s an extra thing to think about that  will muddy my poor brain, so I’m content to hand weave.

But Wo les moteurs….it’s a lot of weaving!

Its perhaps a good thing that these socks take much longer to knit in the first place, because all this weaving would certainly become a log jam in the production line.

I haven’t actually counted the ends, but it took me about 3.5 hours to weave in this pair of knee socks.

The socks are size Medium + (ladies 9 – 10ish) and on a 5’8″ish woman like DW with ‘average’ legs, the hem top should sit just below the knee.

Koigu KPPPM, 100%  Merino

Main colour – #P439; 2nd colour and heels/toes – #P219; 3rd colour -  #P402;

The heels and toes are reinforced with a pale pink Wooly Nylon (from Threadart.com).

Size Medium +, knit with the 72 needle cylinder on the Verdun 47 CSM.

OK. I’m transitioning from struggling/fighting/cussing aryle work to feeling a groove with it and enjoying it. (Well, except that black pair that kept trying to smack me down!)

The argyles are still taking a lot longer, as do any of the ‘special knit’ socks but I know this newly developing skill will provide respites from production knitting along my path.

Not to mention, a great new use for the scrap drawer – each diamond is taking quite less than 5 grams of sock yarn.

Well, these socks aren’t up from the ashes, but my effort is.

I crashed and burned twice on this pair, and both catastrophes are, indeed, in the ashes. Frogging argyle is, um, not going to happen.

Still, three’s the charm and I’m very pleased with this pair of Medium + socks that more closely resemble the vision I had than the heap of yarn in the garbage  pail.

Black is truly a b*gger to knit. It doesn’t help that I broke my glasses three weeks ago and have been relying on Dollar Store magnifying glasses to see. (insert pity here ;o) )

Normally, dropping a stitch is no big deal because I see it and fix it on the fly. But those beastly little black stitches are so hard to see that its easy to miss one, and if you don’t see it and get the weights off – that sucker is gonna’ run from here to tomorrow!

All the more satisfying when the job is done right.

The socks are knit with the 72 cylinder on the Verdun 47.  The yarn: my own fingering weight 75/25 wool/nylon in Jet Black and Mouse Grey, and Lana Grossa Mielenweit, Meeting series, #7710.