Rainbow pattern socks lying on my countertop. Rainbow pattern sock, side profile.
Pattern Boleslawiec sock variation
Needles US 3 - 3.25 mm
Yarn
Hobbii Silly Socks, Happy Clown - 0.5 skein
Pro Lana Sockenwolle Uni, 409 Dark Blue - 0.5 skein

These socks were a bit of an adventure. What with the career break and all, I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend money on a pattern, so instead I decided to visually copy the basic motif in this design and then work it up into my typical socks, including a slip stitch sole and a flap heel.

This required a fair bit of on-the-fly design work on my part, with things first going wrong in the stripes on the gusset, which required at least two rework attempts before I got them right (first I got the colour alternation wrong, and then I realized I wanted a navy line separating the motif from the gusset).

Once the heel flap was complete I then had to work back into the round on the leg, and in my first attempt, I had way too much of a solid navy border between the heel and the motif, which I had to rip out and rework.

The final challenge was in the leg motif itself. Having not designed any colourwork in the round, I pictured the repeats as tiling side-by-side rather than spiralling up. That is, it didn’t occur to me that row 1 ends where row 2 starts, row 2 ends where row 3 starts, and so forth. As a result, the motif as I’d designed it simply didn’t work. So of course I had to then rip that out and redesign it to make it work in the round.

Meanwhile, it had been years since I’d done stranded knitting, so much of the initial knitting involved re-learning how to carry yarn and wrap stitches.

Truly it was a journey.

But in the end it was definitely worth it!