Hi all!  Well it’s been a while since I’ve posted.  Busy time of year – tax season.  I still slip in time to knit and weave, just haven’t had time to blog.

I picked up the socks that I had, for some reason, abandoned.  Here is what I found:

Hard to tell where it starts and where it ends

No wonder I abandoned them, it looked like a mess.  I sat down under some good light and sorted the whole thing out.  I couldn’t find my book on how exactly to  pick up the gusset stitches when knitting two socks on two circular needles so I made something up.  Here is what I ended up with once I was done sorting it all out:

All sorted out now

However, due to the way I picked up the gusset stitches, I ended up wondering how I was going to get all the heel stitches on one needle like they should be.  You see, I had half the gusset stitches on one needle and the other half on the other needle. This worked fine for now, but I knew that down the road I should have half the total number of stitches on one needle and the other half on the other needle.  That is, since the sock consists of 72 stitches, I should have 36 on one needle and 36 on the other.  The way I had them set up I was going to end up with 44 stitches on one needle and 28 on the other (that’s per sock, mind you).  I went to YouTube and found a video (something I probably should have done before attempting my fix, but I thought I was sooooo clever figuring it out).  That’s how I found out that my cleverness was not so clever.  I fixed the problem – just let me say it involved using an extra needle. But I’m on the home stretch now:

Almost done

This is why I love to use circular needles to knit up socks – you get to try them on without stabbing yourself with all the double point needles (and, I’d like to add, without having any of the stitches slip off the needles).

I still have a problem though – for some reason I thought that 20 + 12 = 36!  I know, I know, what was I thinking?  So now the bottom of the foot has 32 stitches and the instep has 36 stitches.  Here is the downfall of doing a pair of socks on two circular needles. Whereas, with the double-points I would just slip a stitch over to another needle, I can’t do that with the ciculars since some of the stitches are never on the outside of the knitting (see picture):

Try to move one stitch from one needle to the other without cutting the yarn!

[Just for clarity – those two strands between the knitting are the cable part of the circular needles, each one represents a different needle.]

So I am adding 4 stitches to each sole and I’ll have the requisite number of stitches when I go into the toe decrease.

Well, finally, done!  Here they are.  Sorry about the quality of the pictures, the light was bad and I was in a hurry.

Here they are!

I made sure that the stripes matched up. The yarn is self-striping and has a regular repeat, so I so I had to start both socks at the same place in one of the colors of the yarn and it looks like I succeeded.  I’m very happy with these socks.