Dithering

After a few days of muggy, heavy weather, we are enjoying a batch of deliciously cool summer weather.  What better project than some thick, cushy, wool socks?  Starting with a brown toe, this pair will fade to blue at the heel, then raspberry at the cuff.

As usual, I am working these two at a time, toe up, magic loop, using both ends of yarn (one end for each sock) from one cake for each color.  Using the fantastic Dither colorwork and a Fish Lips Kiss heel, I am amazed at how quickly these are knitting up.  I started the toes with JMCO on 2.0 mm needles, switching to 2.25 mm needles for the colorwork.  Surprisingly, the extra 0.25 mm combined with an all-stockinette pattern means I was able to get away with only 64 stitches around for the entire foot.

The brown and blue yarns are Jawoll Superwash - the discontinued version with acrylic - and I must say the brown in particular is gorgeous.  You can see rich highlights where the acrylic must have taken up the color differently than the wool.  The blue doesn't have quite the same depth to the color as the brown, but is still pretty.  Texture-wise, this yarn is a bit softer and definitely less crunchy than Lion Brand Sock-Ease, with a much tighter twist and not at all splitty like the LB was.  The raspberry yarn is the super-soft Cascade Heritage Sock leftover from my Butterbluemchen socks.

For the toe shaping, I finally managed to work a JMCO toe with NO mouse ears to fix afterwords - hurray!  In the very first round immediately after the cast on I used M1R/M1L one stitch in from each needle end (4 sts total inc over the first round), then did the same on the second round.  Spaced the next increases out every 3 rounds, and I like the shape.

For the heel, I dropped back down to the 2.0 mm needles but threw in 8 evenly-spaced increases on the first row of the heel (only increased on the heel side, for a total of 40 heel sts).  I am working the entire heel on the smaller needles and will switch to the larger needle as well as decrease the extra 8 stitches back out on the first round after the heel.  The tighter gauge should wear better.  Working 13-12-13 twinned-center-twinned stitches for the FLK heel.

---

More to come!