My amazing and generous friend Deb gifted me with a snowman cross stitch that she had been working on for years. I heart it with the heat of 1000 suns. I can’t take a decent picture of it to save my life and I’m not posting the crappy ones I do have. Someday I’ll show it off.
After she gifted me with this piece of art I had to do something to say thank you. At the time she was struggling with socks and I’m a pretty darned good sock knitter if I do say so myself, so I stole some yarn from her to knit up some socks.
This pair took me longer than it should have just because much of my knitting time these days is not in a setting where I can track rows and cable without dropping all my stitches.
The most important thing I learned from these socks was to buy and use tools you love. Until this pair I had been using either a plastic or metal cable needle. On a yarn crawl I found some fantastic rosewood cable needles and suddenly, I love cables!
The pattern is Paraphernalia by Taina Anttila. A free pattern by the way. When I first saw it, it took my breath away. I mean, look at these cables!
The cable itself was brilliant! I loved watching it form on the needles. The second sock went amazingly fast, knit almost completely in one day when I had a bunch of down time. It was intoxicating to watch the cable flow seemingly effortlessly row after row after row.
I did one less repeat on the leg than the pattern called for. I felt like the sock would have been too long. It turns out that was a good call because I would have run short on the yarn. I don’t have the label for this yarn so it’s going to just be forever listed as a brown wool sock yarn.
You can’t tell, because I only have one foot to shoot but the cable goes up the side of the foot so the right sock is mirrored by the left. I’d highly recommend this pattern. It was quite well written and a fun knit on top of all of that.
