Osborn Fiber Studio

Happy new year, liturgists! Today is Advent 1, which means it’s the first day of the 2014 Christian year. Here we start remembering, celebrating, and participating in the story of Jesus all over again. To celebrate, I’m reducing the price of the Liturgical Year Pattern Series to $40. It began two years ago today; so hard to believe!

We’re still at my in-laws for Thanksgiving weekend, but as soon as we get home we’ll start decorating. Which mostly consists in pulling out our 2′ fake tree from Aldi and hiding it behind about half of the million ornaments my husband owns. It also means pulling out Christmas socks – both last year’s and this year’s, hot off the needles.

The pattern is Christmas in Tallinn, the 9th (I think?) pattern I’ve knit out of Nancy Bush’s Knitting on the Road. The original pattern is for a stocking, but I adapted it to socks. I changed the number of stitches to fit a leg with my gauge, and replaced the stocking foot with a fairly vanilla sock foot. Other than that, I followed the pattern to the letter, but I hardly followed the pattern closely enough to critique it.

Yarn Review: I used Deborah Norville’s Serenity sock yarn in three colors of solids. The stuff is very thin, but the gauge isn’t too fine for socks. I bought it because I could afford to buy four balls of it, quite frankly. I am interested to see how it holds up. It’s soft and nicely heathered. Some people would probably find it splitty, but that sort of thing doesn’t usually bother me.  If economy is the name of your game too, it’s worth a look.

The pattern repeats were rather sizeable, and there was no way I was going to fit a whole number of them on a sock leg. It would have been enormous or child-sized. So I went with my normal sock circumference – 64 stitches – and just split the pattern around it, making a nice seam down the middle. I’m hoping the seams will look a little nicer after I have a chance to block them. I could have made the socks calf length, but it was all I could do to make myself knit them at all. (I’m still a little sick of fair isle.)

Of course, the little braids are my favorite. And it’s always rewarding to look at the clean, patterned insides of a fair isle pattern. (Though insides should stay inside. Last year, in retail stores, there seemed to be a trend of sweaters designed so the floats were all on the outside. That seemed rather tasteless to me. Innards are wonderful things, but they are not for display.)

You may note that the green yarn was only used for a bit of cuff at the top of the socks, and I can inform you that both socks took up exactly one ball of red, minus a few yards. Meaning I have more leftovers than actual yarn used in the socks! Much more. This has left me wondering what exactly I should do with it…