A Little Startitis

Having finished the first Cinco de Mayo sock (note grafted toe!), which was all stockinette, and having started the second Winesap BFL sock, which is 3×1 rib, I was feeling the need for a little more stitch pattern variety. I also want to get some of my multicolored sock yarns knit up. I’ve decided I don’t have to be real fancy and have a new pattern for each sock pair, so I went with two favorites, Monkey and Pablo Deep:

That’s a Monkey cuff, but a stockinette foot, which I decided to do when I saw how nice the Purple Iris (Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock) looked in stockinette. Plus that allowed me to rapidly decrease 8 stitches in the last round of the leg going from 64 to 56, which seems to have worked well (I decreased 2X each repeat in the center, leaning toward each other). Now that the gusset decreases are done, I’m bored with the stockinette, even though it looks pretty, and even though I can knit stockinette and read at the same time.

So, I started another sock in the Pablo Deep pattern.

The yarn is Pagewood Farms St. Elias, a BFL/nylon (80/20) blend, in Crayon. I had seen Crayon in a different base yarn on Ravelry, and it looked much brighter than the BFL I got. At first I was disappointed, but the other day it seemed perfect for another pair of Pablo Deep socks, and I am pleased with how it is knitting up. BFL is my favorite yarn now for socks. Perhaps I just needed to knit a sock in neon colors for the muted palette of Crayon to appeal to me.

I like both of these patterns for multicolored yarns, and I am thinking of knitting a pair of socks that is one of each pattern, as a bit of a scientific experiment to compare the two. Time to rummage in the sock yarn drawer!

The other day, we had dinner at our friend Briana’s house. She has a lovely garden, but she also has a lot on her plate right now, so her roses were in serious need of some deadheading. I offered to deadhead for her (she was very happy about that), and I took some snapshots between snipping. I thought this pink rose was quite lovely.