WIP: worsted socks

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These gorgeous socks are the solution I found to a few personal problems. The most serious of these: excess of sock yarn in my stash; the milder one: cold feet in winter; and the last one: impatience. To solve all these problems in one go I designed a pattern for thick socks knit with two different strands of sock yarn held double through out. With the resulting gauge, these socks fly off the needles, ready to warm cold feet in no time. In addition, even when knitting plain socks, there are not enough stitches to reach the dreaded death by boredom caused by miles and miles of stockinette. But the cherry at the top of this cake is the beautiful marled effect obtained by using a combination of self-striping yarns which keep surprising me as I knit on.

The technical details

Yarn: Scheepjes Invicta Colour, colourways 970 and 975.
Needles: 4mm (US6/UK8).
Pattern: standard construction, i.e. cuff-down, with heel-flap and gusset, and a wedged toe finished with Kitchener stitch.

Brief summary: cast on 40 stitches using German Twisted cast-on. Work leg. Work a 9 row heel flap. Decrease gusset by two stitches in alternate rounds returning to 40 stitches total. Work standard wedged toe.

A note about this yarn: Scheepjes Invicta Colour is one of the worst yarns I have worked with and I regret buying it. Sure it was very cheap and the colours are gorgeous. But it breaks and splits easily and it has nearly zero twist which makes it completely inappropriate as sock yarn (which is what is advertised as). It's just not sturdy enough and the proof is that, once you start wearing them, the socks start felting and becoming thin in certain areas from the first day. I also cannot recommend it for other uses, such as shawls, because there are knots in every skein where two different pieces of thread have been joined, which completely ruin the colour transitions. There is very little chance that these will not ruin the beauty of a larger piece.

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