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Rosy Socks

I have a Basket of Shame. It's where projects go when I'm tired of them or they're frustrating me or I reach a stopping point and don't have the materials to continue immediately, so I set them aside for "just a moment" and suddenly something new comes along. It's a problem.

When I found the Basket of Shame in my closet during the Great Cleaning earlier this year, I decided it was time to stop letting projects get old enough to walk and talk before I finished them. Especially little projects, like these socks, which I believe I cast on a year or two ago.

A photo from above of the corners of a cheese board with purple grapes and fancy crackers and of a battered copy of the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook, two partially-open peach-and-cream roses with a small bunch of leaves, a ball of sagey-green and red yarn, and a partially finished sock with red cuff and heel, and variegated, ribbed leg and partial foot, on thin wooden needles.
Eminently instagrammable.
They're super cute, and it's a simple garter rib pattern (one row rib, one row garter, repeat forever) with charming variegated yarn and contrast red on the cuffs, heels, and (eventual) toes. Blue Ridge Yarns makes these little skein sets with 300 yards of the variegated main color, and 100 yards of a semi-solid coordinate, and they're perfect for making charming matchy-matchy socks, which pleases me.

A crumpled, partially finished sock with red cuff and heel and ribbed, variegated leg and foot, on thin wooden needles, between a small ball of red yarn and a larger ball of sagey-green and red yarn. A small spiral-bound notebook and a spooled pink flexible tape measure fill the foreground of the photo.
There's an error in this photo, but you can't see it yet.
Of course, since two-thirds of a sock had been sitting in a basket for at least a year, and the phone with my construction notes had taken a fatal dive from my pocket in the interim, I had to remeasure and calculate the pattern and stitch count, and make some guesses about the choices past-Sabine made. Like...was she aware that it's called a "heel and toe" skein for a reason? Looking at the little ball of contrast yarn and at how much solid red still needed to be knitted, I was concerned.

I also wasn't paying enough attention to the wrong side of my knitting, because when I picked up the rib pattern, I started doing a plain 2x2 rib, rather than the 2x2 garter rib I'd started with. By the time I noticed, I wasn't willing to do anything about it, so now I have semi-compression socks, with the squeezy part starting about halfway down the foot.

A close-up of two rows of knit stitches held on parallel wooden needles at the red toe of a sock, held up by a white hand.
I like this stage, when everything looks neat and orderly.
Also, it's been long enough since I last finished a sock that I'd forgotten the crucial step before kitchener stitching the toes together: flip the sock right-side-out. I knit in the round at the back of the circle the needles form, which makes my items grow inside-out. The standard kitchener instructions you find when you google them for the thirty-ninth time in your life are aimed at folks who knit on the front side of the circle, which makes their items grow right-side-out. Ah, details. The devil is surely in you.

A pair of socks with variegated sagey-green and red legs and feet, and red cuffs, heels, and toes, on a blue denim background. The left sock has a broad swoosh of red across the leg, and regular reddish stripes around the foot; the right sock has narrow reddish stripes throughout, and is a tighter rib.
I have no idea why the legs are so different. Sock No. 2 on the right.
So my charming matchy-matchy socks have a "design element" courtesy my obliviousness (and compounded by laziness), a charming little seam visible on the outside (see aforementioned laziness), and they're also strikingly different, for being knit on the same exact needles by the same person with the same stitch count and pattern. Dare I blame stress for the really quite dramatic change in tension?

A pair of feet in socks with red toes and variegated sagey-green and red bodies, on a worn wood floor and sticking out from the hem of a blue denim skirt.
There's a subtle difference here, and it's not that I'm bad at pulling socks on evenly.
Also, the ribs are aligned differently on the top of the foot. One sock's pattern portion ends with indented columns, and the other appears to end earlier, because the outer columns are smooth-faced. They fit well, though, and I love the colors—this is the Apple Rose colorway—and the yarn is delightfully sproingy and textural without being rough.

I might need to try toe-up two-at-a-time for the other skein set I have, to use up all the yarn. Or I could try for a repeat of this pair (a more...paired pair, though) and keep the leftover bits for a scarf warp. (Predictably, the other skein set—Crimson Redbud—is also greens and reds, but much darker in tone. It would play well against the leftovers from this set.)

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