Totally Sk(r)ewed

After the last time I blogged about my Skew socks I once again abandoned them.

In my last blog post I had Kitchenered the heel shut and was ready to start working up the leg.

It was very exciting. The sock was starting to come together.

I knit forth with confidence only to have it all come crashing down.

I worked through "decrease the mini-gusset" and was ready to start the leg set up when I stopped, put it all on waste yarn, and tried the darn thing on.

The fit was terrible. I had made a little sock straight jacket.

Oh, sure it looked good from one side. It looked like a normal-ish sock.

But on the other side it was a holey, stretched out mess.

There was a gap at the top of the heel, which the pattern said to expect, but I knew there was no way I was going to be able to pull the fabric together to shut it.

And the decrease line along the outside edge of the foot at the beginning of the round, was so gappy it made fishnet stockings look dense.

The fix, I thought, would be simple. I just needed more fabric to go around my foot, which meant I just needed more stitches.

Determined to figure the pattern out I ripped back all the way to the mid-toe section and increased until I had 64 stitches instead of the paltry 60 I'd tried the first time around. Seriously, I ripped back so far I might as well have started over.

The foot knit back up much quicker than it had the first time around, possible because I knew what to expect this time.

It appears I had once again begun increasing for my mini-gusset when I once again put it aside.

Of course the big issue isn't that I put it aside, again, as much as that I didn't write down what I planned to do. Nope. My old, failed notes, are still on the pattern. I have a vague idea I planned to get the 12 stitches on either side of the center of round marker the pattern calls for, but I didn't make a note of it.

Still, that sounds pretty resonable because I wanted all 15 sts for the heel this time and this entire area is were I needed more slack.

It's a good thing I was able to figure it out where I left off so quickly otherwise these socks would have died a horrible death.

I was laying there at 4 o'clock in the morning, unable to fall back to sleep, and had half decided to toss the pattern aside and just knit plain old socks with the Indulgence yarn. It really is nice yarn and it's terrible for it to be so neglected. Poor, poor yarn.

You know you have too many projects on the go when they start giving you insomnia.

On the other hand it wasn't just not knowing where I was in the pattern that was causing me to feel that way. So far I haven't been having fun with this pattern. I've been "working" on this one sock for around four months(!) and have very little to show for it.

I mean, it's a pair of socks. They should only take two weeks!

Part of the delay is because I keep thinking I can only work on them in a quite time when I can focus on the pattern. The other part is because I don't know if I'll actually get a comfortable pair of socks out of the deal.

Socks are my relaxing project, they shouldn't be such an emotional investment.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go beat them into submission.