I needed a Finished Object

Friday's are for finished objects and as I haven't had a chance to wash and block my ColourMart Spring Contest Shawl, and people were asking very nicely, presenting.....

Follow that Stripe!

The pattern will tell you that I have a love affair with self striping sock yarns, but, as with many knitters I get bored easily....Ohh, look shiny new yarn!  So I needed something a little more interesting to knit than just a plain Jane (or John, I knit for boys too) sock.
 


Do you remember a while back I mentioned a dinner conversation where the kids and I were talking about all the different places that inspiration can come from?  We talked about knitters and artists who look to math, biology, botany and everything else in the world.  We talked about the fact that inspiration can come from the most unlikely sources and TOB looked at me in all seriousness and asked this question..










"Mom, do all knitters do that, or are you just weird?"  Which really is a whole different conversation to be having, especially with a teenager!


But, that one word, Weird, was what started this whole journey.

Weird doesn't fit the spelling mnemonic I before E, except after C, but as anyone who has ever taken a spelling test will tell you, that rule has more words that are exceptions than follow it!  But that was the inspiration for how to knit this (these) socks. 

I wasn't sure at first that everything would work out the way I planned.  Who uses spelling to design a sock? (Other than me, of course!)  But I grabbed one of the (too many) skeins of self striping sock yarn that had been languishing in the stash and tried it out.

Hmm, so I before E except after C works, but what about the others?
 
Truth be told, I spent plenty of time on Google looking to see what all the exceptions to the rule were...I knew unless it says E as in Seize but from there I drew a blank!

I shortly found out that Unless it says A and Unless it Says I were also not only possible, but gave yet another spin to the pattern, so instead of one pair of socks having to be knit, there were really 5.
 
 (Yes I know, you only see 4 different socks there, and they are all pairs I swear on my stash!  I just didn't have enough feet available to get photo's of them all at one time!)

Originally I was going to skip the final exception, until one of the test knitters said something about the way she knit her socks which finalized it. 

I will tell you that once you get the basic idea and have worked your set up rows for the pattern stitches you can probably not print those, so if you are near a handy computer you can work from the pdf file and then consider these socks your "pocket knitting" and not even worry about dragging the pattern around with you at all!

I found out part way through having it test knit, that one of test knitters was knitting socks for the very first time using this pattern! 

I had a nice mix of experienced knitters who adjusted things to be the way they wanted (toe up for example) and a sock newbie, what more could any designer want?

I can tell you what the knitters want, having seen teaser photo's and test knitters projects, they wanted the pattern and sooner rather than later!  Between forum postings, private messages and emails the consensus was that people were tired of me dragging my feet* and wanted to see the pattern!

You can get it for yourself on Ravelry in my pattern store here.

I love seeing what other people come up with when using my patterns, the easiest way for me to see what you knit is to link the pattern to your project page in Ravelry.  If you haven't joined, you should, it is awesome!

~M

*I hadn't originally planned on two other patterns being published last weekend!