Knitloops

... or the pattern during the Supersock World Championship that nearly drove me crazy, lol.

I alread showed you a picture of all my SWC socks last week, but I haven't told you about the one pattern that really was an effort to knit. Not because the pattern is so difficult, but because I found it hard to find the perfect yarn.

Knitloops, a free pattern by Amelia Archer available from the Knitty website, uses vertical stranding to creat the vertical stripes. To avoid having to weave in lots of ends, the loops for the vertical strands are taken from the working yarn, which of course means that the length of the loops sets the length of the stripes. And that is where my trouble started.

I don't have many self-striping yarns in my stash, and with the ones I tried - I actually cast on three times - the pattern didn't turn out nice at all. Because the loops ended in  stripe in the same colour, because they were on a stripe with hardly any contrast, whatever... I frogged three times. Until I had my d'oh!-moment and realized that the socks are my second pair and won't gain any points in the competiton anyhow. So why stick to the requirements? After that I cast on again, with the yarn that was my first choice, and just went ahead and adjusted the pattern, i.e. the length of the loops. And here we are: I might have new favourite pair to wear these days. :)