Failure to Communicate

So Little to Show for Several Hours of Work

This picture really fails to communicate almost anything about the upscaled Dragon Scale socks. I hope that at least the barest outline of scales is visible in the picture. The colorway I chose (to be man friendly) defies all attempts at photography. Unfortunately, it's also subtle when you are looking directly at these socks. For the record, it's Socks that Rock (Light) in the Beryl colorway. I'm not sure yet whether it's the variagation in the yarn, the color of the yarn,. or the fact that I have downsized the scales to create a 20 stitch repeat, although my suspicions lie mostly with the former two explanations. I may try knitting the pattern flat with a solid, lighter colored yarn if things don't get a bit better as I get farther along -- just to be sure I'm not leading anyone astray. I was considering ripping these again, but so far I've only got about 2.5" of sock top and I don't want to make any rash decisions before I've given the pattern more time to play out. I am beginning to think that Claudia's orange Dragon suggestion from yesterday might have been a better option than what I chose, but I know for a fact that the intended recipent would probably reject orange Dragons, no matter how lovely the pattern turned out -- and so far, he is happy with these, and they fit him. And a sock that might get worn is a happy sock.

I used the same process that I used to upscale the original stitch pattern for the first pair of socks to downscale the pattern for this pair. I had originally hoped to just use 3 intervals of the original pattern (78 stitches being not so bad given how this pattern pulls in a bit) but I found it impossible to center things so that I could get a nice design over both the heel and the toe. The down-scaled (no pun intended) pattern has a 20 stitch interval and this sock uses 4 intervals.

Over ~40 stitches on bamboo US 1's (2.25 mm) I'm getting right around 4.25" of sock. When I did the same thing on US 1.5's (2.5 mm) I got about 4.5" of sock. I suspect that dropping down another needle size (US 0's/2.0 mm) would get it very close to 40 stitches to 4". So that should give anyone knitting the sock a fair amount of latitude in the sock sizing with the same yarn just by changing the needle size. I've tried the cuff out on my husband (who is a pretty standard man's size 10.5) and it fits just fine and doesn't cut off his circulation. So I hope that this pattern will mean that there are dragons for everyone -- at least everyone of adult size. I'll leave the exercise of creating a child-sized sock to someone else.

I'm also pleased with the way that the cuff and the pattern combine. The garter stitch gets a little wavy, but not so wavy as to disturb the manly creature that lives in my house.

I don't have a good ETA for completion of the first sock -- it takes a while to traverse the rows with the decreases on them. I'd love to have the leg part finished by the weekend. So far, I've got 3 pattern repeats to 2 inches. I'm going to need to do about 5 more before it's time to turn the heel. I'm only going to work about 6" of leg on these socks, otherwise I won't have a pattern done before Christmas. And, I promise, if the first sock comes out well, I'll write up the pattern for both sizes before I take on the second sock.