I am a big fan of treating myself on my birthday, and today I think I started a new little tradition along those lines: a new pair of hand-knit socks. I love fresh-off-the-needles socks, when they’re still all firm and unstretched, so when I finished these on Monday I decided to save them until today. It was such an easy, nice little thing to do for myself, and I’m glad I thought of it.

These are Fika, from the spring issue of Pom Pom Quarterly, which I finally subscribed to. Every new issue of Pom Pom has at least one pattern in it that I love, and every time I wish to myself that I was a subscriber, so I finally just went for it and I’m so glad I did. Besides being the source of lovely patterns and other writing, it’s beautiful to look at, and the paper stock and printing make it feel almost like a little book. Anyway, the spring issue was the first one I got as part of my subscription, and it just made sense that Fika would be the first thing I cast on.

I’ve had this Koigu in my stash for ages (years, maybe even) and although I was originally thinking it would work well for a pair of Smokestack Socks, I’m really glad I used it for Fika. The twisted rib is a great way to both show off and break up the fun speckled colourway, and all the colours in the yarn made choosing the contrast stripe really fun (originally, I had planned to use red, but then I saw this picture and changed my mind.)

I knit these at my usual gauge, which was a bit of a miscalculation on my part, since the largest size has you cast on 64 stitches — four fewer than I’d usually go with. I thought to myself: What’s four stitches? And knit along quite merrily, making up for the deficit by decreasing fewer stitches at the gussets. As you can see, the socks fit quite nicely, but they are hard to pull on! The upside, of course, is that they don’t sag. The next time I knit these, I’ll just go up a needle size, which will give me the wiggle room I need. And there will certainly be a next time, because as I knit blissfully away on these I went into a kind of autopilot and, after casting on, didn’t refer to the pattern again until the toe, which means the missed the novel heel shaping! I’m intrigued, though, so another pair is certainly in my future.

Details
Pattern: Fika by Maribeth White
Yarn: Koigu KPPPM in P336 (the contrast is Koigu needlepoint yarn in #3332 — this is sold in 10-yard mini-mini skeins, which is perfect for this sort of detail)
Needles: 2.25mm
Notes: Just what I mentioned above about ignoring the heel shaping and doing fewer gusset decreases. I actually also knit the heel in a different yarn, because although I really love Koigu for socks, I’m hard on my heels, and it wears through a bit more quickly than a yarn with nylon reinforcement. I chose a low-contrast colour though, so it didn’t compete with the rest of the design and I’m quite pleased with the overall look (you can see just a hint of grey heel in the photo above). Ravelled here.