A New Pattern to Celebrate Socktober!!!

Effervescence Socks by iknit2purl2 on Ravelry

To celebrate Socktober, I designed a sock pattern to share with all of you! Effervescence is now available  as a free download on Ravelry.  It's an easy knit, using the mock cable stitch.  By utilizing yarnovers and slipped stitches, you create a pretty cable pattern over a 2x2 rib.  This sock pattern alternates the mock cable stitch between the ribs which creates a bubbly, effervescent look over the sock.  And did I mention it's easy? An 8 stitch pattern over 4 rows creates this fun look!

The yarn above is The Sanguine Gryphon Skinny Bugga in Miss Spider.  At 450 yards, one skein of this fingering weight sock yarn is more than enough to make a pair of Woman's socks in size Medium.  For the pair below, I used Blue Moon Fiber Arts Lightweight Socks That Rock yarn in Turquoise.  Again, one skein (360 yards) was more than enough for a pair of Woman's Size Medium socks.

 

I Have New Socks!

I am SOOO excited! My first sock pattern, April Showers Bring May Flowers, is now available on Ravelry as a free pattern download!

The Spring Weather here in the Atlanta area was definitely the inspiration for these socks. Lots of rain brings out all of the beautiful flowers...the cherrytrees, followed by the dogwoods, magnolias, wisteria and azaelas! People start planting their annual summer flower gardens right about the first of May here. Lots of impatiens and begonias! Such a pretty time of year!

I used Knit Picks Palette Yarn which is a fingering weight yarn and 100% Peruvian Highland Wool. I used less than 2 skeins of Celestial as the main color, and way less than 1 skein each of fushcia and sky for the flowers and raindrops.

Since I've tried some colorwork techniques this past winter with Selbu Mittens and Fair Isle Mittens , I thought I would like to knit some socks with colorwork. As you all already know, I have been quite busy knitting socks these past few weeks. Definitely portable as I drive the kiddos here and there (there's baseball season for my son and lots of rehearsals and dance classes for my daughter's Spring Performance and Recitals). But being in an It's Spring frame of mind, I wanted to knit socks that reminded my of Springtime.

 A little bit about this pattern...it's more or less just a basic stockinette stitch sock with some colorwork added to the leg. There are only 31 rows of colorwork, of which 14 rows are solid colors. And you never work with more than 2 colors at once.  Not too difficult, right? It was a lot of fun to design and playing with the Knit Visualizer software was really a lot of fun!  You can find the the pattern on Raverly. It's free!

Happy Spring!

Irish Hiking Mitts - My First Pattern!

Believe it or not, I have spent much of the past week designing my first knitting pattern! I am SOOO excited! Irish Hiking Mitts is now available on Ravelry as a free pattern download! It’s my holiday gift for all of you lovely knitty and yarny people who have been so encouraging over the past year!

Since I’ve never attempted designing a pattern to share before, it took a while to figure out what to try. My priorities in chosing a first project: (1) a small project and (2) something that I could knit with yarn from my stash.  With the colder weather, I thought fingerless mitts would be a great place to start…something fairly simple with an interesting pattern. I love knitting cables and if you haven't tried them yet, this is an easy pattern to try! I adapted these mitts from Adrian Bizilia’s Irish Hiking Scarf…a beautiful cable pattern. I hope Adrian finds that these mitts are true to her original and lovely pattern!  And ,Stashbustarmy - this project uses about 220 yards (or less) of worsted weight yarn!

Once I started knitting, it wasn’t terribly difficult to write the pattern down. The thing with mitts is that you get a chance (more or less) to test knit your pattern by working the second mitt. Hopefully, I found most of the errors when I did this! I also made a second pair to test the whole pattern. It was a little bit of a challenge to add the pattern onto Ravelry. I’m going to stick to the theory that creative people (cause that’s what I am now, right?) are not necessarily tech people. It took a while for me to figure out how to save my Word file as a PDF file. The instructions on Ravelry were great and I managed to set myself up as a designer and upload my PDF file into the Ravelry library fairly quickly.

Hope you all get a chance to make some warm and toasty Irish Hiking Mitts soon! Happy Holidays!