Let's chat some more about the socks it all began with, shall we? As I told you when I introduced the Irish at Heart collection the other day, it all started with self-striping sock yarn in - at least for me - Irish colours. Now, as much as I love self-striping yarn when it's in the skein, I find it kind of boring to knit plain Vanilla socks, so most often I try to manipulate the sripes somehow. In this case, working a slipped stitch here and there, the stripes turned into hearts and the idea for Irish at Heart was born.
In the picture above you can see at the toe the plain stripes the yarn forms without any manipulation. To turn it into a pattern like the all-over heart pattern, the yarn needs to have a certain stripe squence and in addition the width of the sock needs to be chosen according to the yarn.
In my sample the yardage of the small stripes is sufficient for two rounds plain Stockinette on socks with 64 stititches, which I was able to turn into three rounds in slipped stitches on socks with 60 sts. Of course it needs a bit of calculation, trial and error and you shouldn't be too persnickety about always working full rounds (I did start the new heart stripe whenever the yarn changed), but it is a fun experiment to try.
The Irish at Heart pattern - available for individual download here and as part of the Irish at Heart collection here - comes with an extra page explaining how I calculated the number of stitches and with some general ideas for the use of a self-striping yarn - for all you adventurous knitters out there!
With today's post you've seen and read all there is to tell about my new collection of sock patterns, so I'll return to my knitting needles to have some more new patterns to show soon.
Happy knitting, everyone!
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