Dragon Details

I'm touched that so many of you enjoyed my short departure into creative writing. Sunday morning something grabbed a hold of me and I needed to do more than just show a picture of a completed sock. I think it was all the comments on my previous post about dragons and all the different ways dragons have been described and used in both human mythology and fantasy fiction. I'm enjoying my journey with these socks so much, I guess I just needed to create some of my own dragon mythology.

Unfortunately, that small picture doesn't show off a lot of the details in these socks. So I thought I would wrap up the "first completed sock" post with some detail images of the sock design. Y'all know how much I love using the macro mode on my camera!

The Back of the Sock

I'm pleased with the back of the sock. Instead of opting for a plain heel, I extended the central scale pattern down by another half interval to complete the scale. I think that little detail makes the sock a nice option for sandal wearing, and shouldn't put too much extra bulk at the heel or cause problems in a shoe.

Short Row Heel

This is probably my first truly successful stockinette short row heel ever. Priscilla Gibson Roberts definitely knows her stuff when it comes to short row heels. If you haven't looked through a copy of her book, Simple Socks: Plain and Fancy, I'd highly recommend it. It's a great companion to Lucy Neatby's Cool Socks, Warm Feet. I love love love the way this heel fits into the sock. Don't get me wrong, I loves me a nice Dutch heel, but for these socks, the short row heel is what is meant to be, and it's almost impossible to carry the motif down the heel without making a short row heel.

Detail of the Dragon Toe from the Side

The toe came out even better from the side than I could have predicted. Cool thing about it? I was basically just winging it and taking advantage of the decreases that were already built into the pattern.

Dragon Toe from the Top

I'm pretty pleased with the way this looks from the top down, as well. I thought about trying to curve those center decrease lines in towards the toe point, but didn't because I thought it would make the side scales look really odd. You can't see it, but this was also one of my nicer grafting efforts as well.

Of course, I did try the sock on, and I'm also pretty happy with the fit. It's just a little tight for me (but still comfortable) so I don't think it will be too loose for my sister-in-law (I just know her shoe size because my brother wanted to me to keep it as a surprise for her).

I've gotten the second sock started, and I've completed two intervals -- I'm going more slowly with the second sock because the cotton is taking a little bit of a toll on my hands. I'm using the second sock to go back over my notes to see if I can put together a decent pattern.

There definitely will be a pattern. I don't know yet whether I will give it away or sell it. That will probably depend on whether I do additional sizes. Just to accomodate a wide variety of foot lengths, I need to come up with an additional toe design (otherwise, it's going to be hard to get the length of the sock right for people without size 8 feet). I'd also really like to scale the design up for someone of manly proportions. That will mean working out everything with a different gauge, a different pattern interval and making sure I have good things for the heels and toes. Doing that and getting all instructions into usable form takes a lot of work.

Once I get toward the end of the project, I'll definitely post the scale pattern itself -- I was just riffing off of Barbara Walker and the Knitter did promise the Dragon that she would share that scale pattern with the rest of the world.

Happy Valentine's Day!