Candy: Broken Jack

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General Hogbuffer is one of the most creative of sock's designers out there. Her/his (hard to know) work includes the more standard lace, cable and colour-work socks, but also a lot of funky construction involving unusual geometric shapes.

Today I chose Jurga's Broken Jack for eye-candy because, guess what!, I've got the same yarn she used in my stash and I think I'm going to knit myself the same socks.

In Broken Jack, General Hogbuffer had the brilliant idea of using self-striping yarn instead of the colour-blocks that the construction suggests. This yields pretty nice results, since the simplicity of the lozenges is surprisingly compatible with the complexity of nearly-random stripes. In addition, in order to avoid working intarsia in the round or knitting socks flat, hard choice to make, but I surely don't recommend attempting intarsia in the round, even in a small project such as socks, this sentence is turning out really long, but here is the conclusion, these socks are knitted using short rows in order to create the lozenge shapes.

In my country we use the expression a flag colour as synonymous of a bright, ugly colour, so it is no surprise that the General's original socks are not more popular. Jurga added to the original idea a pretty nice yarn. This Lithuanian lady has some really great taste, you can check out her lovely project's page if you're looking for inspiration for your next project.

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