Thursday, August 19, 2010

Tour of socks, part two: Modified Milkmaid


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Originally uploaded by Wordpurler
Strictly speaking, this should have been the first stop on our tour, because it was the first pair of socks I made last year, and the first of my semi-obsessive set of Upstream constructions. Oops. Please excuse me the non-chronological order of our tour.

One of the patterns in New Pathways for sock knitters is for the Milkmaid Socks. They are a darling pair of white and blue socks with a lace inset. (Most milkmaids would probably end up with cow pie on their socks, but these must be for some sort of Disney-fied clean and tidy milkmaid, or for one with highly effective rubber boots.)

I received this Lane Cervinia yarn in a swap package and it sat around in my stash for a year or so until, one day, it called out to me that it needed to be socks.

(This was after I tried to force it into becoming an Ishbel shawlette. Epic Fail. It wanted to be socks.)

I dug out the New Pathways book and, remembering how much this yarn hated to be lace, started a standard toe and a plain stockinette foot on size 2 needles. By the time I finished the gusset and heel I decided to spice things up a bit and stole a modified Feather-and-Fan cuff from the Milkmaid socks. (It uses p2tog rather than k2tog for the decreases, which yields a very interesting texture.)

And, where I'd ended up with neck and shoulder pain when I knitted socks on size 0s or 1s, size 2s seemed to work just dandy.

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