sock talk

My latest finished project is these Jaywalkers, and I love them. It’s actually the third time I’ve made this pattern — more than I’ve repeated any other pattern — but only the first time I’ve used Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock for socks! I’ve used that yarn for other projects like scarves and gloves before, but it’s funny how it’s taken me 18 months of working at Lorna’s to use the famed sock yarn for socks, when I knit socks all the time.

The colors are 38ns Brick and a self-striping experiment I dyed myself. I rewound two skeins of sock yarn into one giant-circumference skein (the length of my craft room!) so that dyeing it in half would produce long sections of each color. (The two colors I used were leftover dye from each end of the Roadside Gerry colorway.) I’m really happy with how the finished socks turned out, but I was surprised that the stripes weren’t wider! Hand-dyed self-striping yarn really is magical.

I used a special heel technique on this pair: the mini-heel flap, mini-gusset short-row heel. I love the look of a short row heel when using contrasting colors, but the Jaywalker pattern is known to constrict in the ankle and this heel gives more room in that area. Basically, you start out knitting a heel flap over half the stitches as usual, but instead of decreasing over the heel turn you use all of the stitches to knit a full-fledged short-row heel, and then pick up and decrease the small amount of gusset stitches necessary when you return to circular knitting. It looks neat, right? I have another pair of socks coming up on which I’ll use the same technique, so I think I’ll get pictures of the steps at that point.

Even though I started this pair back in December and it languished unfinished for a long time, I’m really happy with the project. It’s another great pair of socks to add to my collection– I’ll be wearing them as much as possible before the weather turns hot, and looking forward to breaking them back out in the fall!