2006-06: Pomatomus socks

Pattern: Pomatomus by Cookie A.
Yarn: Elann's Sock It To Me Colori in Seadrifter, 85gm
Needle: 2.5mm Addi Turbo 32" circular, tubular cast on, magic loop

What a quick knit! Well, quick after finally deciding on the right yarn.

When I first saw these socks I thought it'd be neat to have them mirror images of each other. But research on the web uncovered an issue... you'd have to have the ktbl stitches twist the other way for the "scales" to have the same dimensional impact. Not wanting to make things too difficult for myself, I bagged that idea.

I had also considered knitting these 2 at a time, but the pattern requires you to move stitches from one needle to another and that can be a hassle when the socks are side by side on a needle. Instead, I decided to knit one at a time using the magic loop method.

With that, I didn't modify the pattern, but I did redistribute the stitches a bit to make things easier for me.

I'm not good with yo's at the beginning of a needle so I rearranged the stitches to have the last st of the previous round as the first st of the round. That meant for rounds 1-11, each half-round started with ktbl, yo.

After completing round 22 of Chart A, I rearranged the stitches in order to begin round 1 with the ktbl of the previous round. Wow, that must sound really confusing. Like most sock knitting, it's "huh?" when you read it, but it works when you do it.

For Chart B, I put the instep stitches on one side of the circular and the sole stitches on the other. When there was a yo at the beginning of the instep, I opted to not do the yo on that round and instead picked up the loop on the next round. It helped keep those yo's from getting too large.

The last little trick was to knit the toe decreases until there were 20 sts total, use Rebecca's method of avoiding dog ears, then graft the remaining 16sts.

Thanks for the pattern Cookie!

Related posts:
Pomatomus challenge: Knit them in Koigu?
Plan B: Picking a different yarn
Plan D: Picking yet a different yarn
Choices: What was behind my yarn choice