Fixation Socks

Pattern: Socks
Yarn: 1 50g/100 yd ball Cascade Fixation (98.3% cotton/1.7% elastic) in #9464. One ball actually made three socks, the two shown here and a *cough* rather smaller one. It was a swatch sock. Really.
Needles: 3.0mm (US 3)
Gauge: 7.5 sts = 1"
Knitting Time and Date Completed: Four hours each, completed 06/30/07
Notes: Although Boo's first socks were beautiful, they weren't exactly a success in the knittability and wearability departments. Knitting anything at 12 stitches to the inch is asking for a nervous breakdown, and after they were done Boo said the socks were "itchy." She loved them when she saw them, she really did, but she only wore them once before refusing to wear them again (cf. "itchy").

So, for my second attempt, I went with cotton, and I went with bigger yarn. Much bigger yarn. I used Cascade Fixation, which is cotton with a deceptively small amount of elastic blended in. It says 1.7%, but that 1.7% goes a long, long way. It's a very pleasant yarn to work with, soft and springy, but it took me a while to get the hang of what tension to use (for the record, really, really loose). It's very easy to have a lot of tension on the yarn without noticing, and I had to make a special effort to make sure that there was plenty of yarn pulled free and that I wasn't just stretching the same three inches of yarn over more and more stitches. But the results were very nice, and Boo loves them and declares them non-itchy. That's good enough for me.



Detail of heel flap

I happened to be starting my heel flap at the same moment that I was sitting next to someone working from Charlene Schurch's Sensational Knitted Socks, and I decided to try the garter-stitch border for the heel flap. It worked up quite nicely, and I liked both the effect of the border and how nicely the stitches picked up.



So, about the"ruffle"; at the top. This is not a ruffle, per se, it's actually just your everyday 2x2 ribbing that didn't rib because of the elastic. Presumably. But it looked nice, so I decided that it was a feature instead of a bug and carried on.



Poor Greebo. I really have no idea why he doesn't just run, run for his life every time he sees Boo coming. And yet, he will seek her out. Go figure.