Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Bandwagon jumping

This weekend I did this:

First monkey sock

First monkey sock

I'm seeing so many people working on these Monkey socks at the moment and Knit-Nurse finally pushed me over the edge. That and the fact that I needed something other than unpicking Thermal to work on over the long weekend. Why not look here and here for two other examples of Monkey-knitters (that sounds a bit weird!) from my blogroll. I love this pattern and would heartily echo everything that Cara at January One has to say in that respect. The yarn is Regia Bamboo which I originally bought to knit Pomatomus (an attempt that ended in failure and a sulk big enough to prevent me from blogging about it) but I guess working another Cookie A pattern instead is a fair substitute. The yarn has a white thread plied into it which seems to make lace patterns get blurred quite easily but it is just about OK for this pattern. I do like the feel of this yarn though, nice and soft and more comfortable to wear than a cotton blend I think, we shall see how durable it turns out to be.

Of course the other purpose for knitting these is as a warm-up for Sockapalooza 4. The main areas I've noticed in this sock that I'd like to get better on are to have a neater looking gusset - in respect of both the picked up stitches and the decreases (my toe decreases look fine so I would like to achieve a similar look for the gusset decreases) and a neater join at the cuff of the sock. I will work on these aspects in the second Monkey sock and hopefully they will be remedied before I start work on my pal's socks. A few more ideas are coming on that front and I have now been in contact with my pals in both directions, this is getting very exciting!

1 comment:

DDKK said...

Very nice! You're shaming me now, I still haven't finished the first one! I also had problems with the heel detail - well, not problems as such, just that I decided it would work better to pick up a couple of extra stitches and then decrease them on the next round. I'm not sure if it's my technique or what but I often get left with an annoying gap at the join.