sock problems & solutions
I have skinny feet. Not short, just really REALLY skinny. Also, I knit relatively loosely. Also, I hate baggy socks. Also, I don’t like to knit with needles smaller than US 0 (2.0mm). Add these facts together and you will see that I have problems following other people’s sock patterns.
I usually get about 8st/inch with fingering yarn on my 2.0mm needles, which is a typical sock gauge — but my I need my socks to be an inch or two smaller around than the pattern size. Therefore, I must re-write every pattern. This is not a problem with a pattern that has a small repeat, say, a 6, 8, or 10 stitch repeat. I just figure out how many repeats I need to leave out, and go from there. But there are a lot of cute socks with larger repeats — Cookie’s “Monkey”, for instance. It’s got four repeats of a 16-st lace pattern, so 64 stitches around — far too big for me.
So last night I scaled down and re-charted the lace pattern to be a 12-st repeat, made a 48-st toe, and tried out my scaled-down pattern. So far it’s looking REALLY good, and it should fit properly. Not all lace patterns can be successfully scaled down, but Monkey can!
Photo of original chart vs. scaled-down version:
And the toe of the first sock:
Category: Blog, Handmade 2 comments »
June 10th, 2007 at 5:51 pm
Looking good so far!
July 2nd, 2007 at 7:31 am
Thank you for posting. This is very helpful. I was thinking that I would have to give up on Monkey for now because it was too big for the yarn. I also like that you are doing a toe up one. I think I might follow suit.