This is the Boyland sock pattern by Laine in their pattern collection 52 Weeks of Socks. I used one skein of Cascade’s 75% superwash merino and 25% nylon yarn in “Snow”, and a few tiny skeins of fingering weight yarn hand-dyed by Wild in the Woods– one and a half skeins of a blue-purple colour and half a skein of a dark green colour. The Wild in the Woods yarn was a gift, and part of a collection of sample yarn sold last year, so I am not sure which colourways the two colours I used are. I’m treasuring these wonderful hand-dyed yarns, so I used the Cascade yarn to supplement them.
I love this pattern! I chose the large size because I tend to have large feet in comparison to pattern sizes, but I definitely could have sized down. I had to cut out about 4 centimetres of the foot to avoid making cartoonishly long socks for my feet.
I’ve been practicing colourwork to figure out tension. I think I have fairly tight tension, so I discovered that I need to size up when I attempt a pattern where the colourwork sits on a part of the garment that needs to be fitted in a certain way. For example, I recently frogged the second sweater I ever finished, which had a band of colourwork across the shoulders, because it was constrictive and I couldn’t raise my arms very much. These socks were great practice. Once I’m confident with two stranded colourwork I’d love to try multiple colours, but I’m trying to pace myself.
You can see in the picture above that the colourwork near the toe is slightly different for each sock- this was unintentional, I was off by about three stitches a few rows in. But I decided to keep the mistake. It’s barely noticeable, and I kind of like having imperfect things that I made by hand. That’s one way that I’m trying to get past my need to excel at new things straightaway, by accepting small mistakes even if I could go back and fix them.
