All right. My mitt pattern has been going like gangbusters which makes me very happy. My Rhinebeck budget thanks you all sincerely, and would you all please put pictures up in Ravelry already so I can see what everyone’s come up with? Thank you.
In the meantime, I have finished a pair of socks that owe their existence to the crazy Battlestar Galactica Viper Pilot socks of doom. Viper Pilots were a crash course on twisted stitches and complicated cables, and I learned from them that I enjoy gnarly charts and watching the cables grow off the needles. So I printed out the pattern and dove in.
JADE SLIPPERS SOCKS
Pattern: Glass Slippers, by Caitlin Meyer, available in the Fall 2009 issue of Knotions
Yarn: Dream in Color Smooshy in Good Luck Jade
Needles: US1/2.25mm
Notes: Oh boy. Let me state this first: This is an amazingly beautiful pattern. The concept is clever and the finished socks are a delight to wear. I enjoyed the vast majority of the knitting of these socks. And these socks got to do quite a bit of traveling. In addition to attending the Steuben Parade, they met Paula Deen:
(She’s in the front, under the Book Revue sign, in lavender. Yes, it was very crowded. Yes, I took advantage of the fierce-looking DPNS to get myself some breathing space. Knitting ninja, that’s me.) Anyway! I have some pretty cultured footwear.
But. Somewhere along the line something happened to this patten and got things twisted around, and when you’re dealing with this many cables, extra twists are really not good news.
The biggest problem I encountered was the mislabeling of Charts A and B, which left me utterly bewildered for quite some time while knitting the first sock. It’s a pretty predictable cable, so once I figured out that I hadn’t done anything wrong, I just went on ahead and did what the cables told me they wanted to do, and they led me right into the foot chart like they were supposed to. The second time I kept an eye on the charts and if you use B where it said A and A where it said B it worked out just right. The foot chart, happily was just fine.
I also found the given instructions for the heel chart to be curiously short — so I just went ahead and did my usual heel flap of 36 rows, instead of the 20 called for. And on a more personal-quirk level, I found the charts in general difficult to read on my hard copy. Personally, I find it a lot easier on the eyes if things like cables and decreases that stretch over more then one cell don’t have the cell border dividing them in half; sadly, these charts didn’t do that, and I had a really difficult time getting comfortable with them.
The toes on these socks were specifically written to not need grafting, but I went ahead and grafted them anyway. I enjoy a good grafted toe, and I am that odd duck knitter who actually enjoys the act of grafting.
I’m not sure if the issues I had with this pattern are things that tech editing would have helped with, or things got turned around in preparing it for the web, or what the story is. I do know Knotions had already corrected a few errors before I printed out the pattern, but never marked them as errata. (I was a little surprised by that, to be honest.) But the personal lesson I’m taking away from these socks, aside from extra practice in some hard-core cabling, is that I need to give patterns a much closer-read over before I start. Encountering things like this in mid-cable is really not the best time.
And one more personal quirk, if I might? I really wish Knotions would combine everything for printing, instead of making the directions and charts two separate documents, especially when the header information prints out on each one.
So, having gotten all that out of the way, I think these socks are worth a knit if you’re into cables, because they look just spectacular, don’t they? You should just be prepared to double-check that you are working off the right chart, and read carefully, so you don’t end up like me, sitting on a friend’s couch at two in the morning, drinking wine like a fish in the hopes that maybe it will make you understand where you screwed up, while your friend laughs at you, and her dogs try to shed on your yarn. (It’s how dogs help.) Trust me, it’s not a pretty picture. I go through these things so you don’t have to.