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.

It never fails to amaze me how quickly I can get something finished if I just focus on it. A few days after I posted about my current socks, I noticed a hole in the heel of one of my favourite pairs. The next day, I found a hole in the heel of another pair. Despite those holes being entirely unrelated to the pair on my needles, finding them lit something of a fire under me, and barely more than a week later I finished that pair.

I actually would have been done sooner, but I made a very foolish yarn calculation when going away for Easter weekend and ran out of yarn (I know better than this, and yet…) Oh well. They’re finished now and they are as fun as I hoped they would be.

Originally, I’d only been planning contrast heels, but then a couple of you suggested contrast toes too, and I’m so glad you did. They are the perfect touch. For more fun, I alternated the stripe sequence between socks. It’s subtle, and a nice little twist on perfectly matched stripes. (I’d already planned to do this, but it came in extra handy over Easter since it meant I didn’t have to waste any of the yarn I had with me.)

There’s not much to say about these. They’re my standard 68-stitch, top-down sock. The stripes ended up being a perfect width to base measurements on, which doesn’t always happen, but definitely makes lining things up from one sock to the other much easier.

Details
Yarn: Knit Picks Felici in Lighthouse (with leftover Sweet Fiber Super Sweet Sock in Spanish Coin for the contrast)
Pattern: Old faithful
Notes: No change from the usual, though I will say the choice of contrast colour was inspired by lighthouse lights. That subsequently led to my project name, which meant every time I picked these up this song would pop into my head, making for quite an enjoyable project. Ravelled here.

Based on the colours alone, I’d say this yarn was inspired by fall. But honestly, for me true sweater weather doesn’t fully assert itself until mid-winter — by late January, the worsted weight sweaters that earlier seemed more like jackets than cardigans are in regular rotation and another lighter needs at least one heavy-ish layer underneath it. (The temperature went up to -4 last week, and I got all excited and wore just a T-shirt under my Grace cardigan. When I got to work, I realized my  mistake and ended up wearing my emergency wool sweater over top. Turns out sweater weather is as much an indoor thing as outdoor).

Anyway. I can happily say that despite the very, very cold weather, my feet have been nice and warm thanks to my supply of wool socks. Given my feelings about sweater weather, then, it should come as no surprise that I decided to ignore the seasonal colours and knit these up in the dead of winter.

Although these were on my needles for a while, don’t read that as a lack of enthusiasm on my part. (I actually finished these a while ago and, really, I was just enthusiastic about an actual sweater.) When these were my actual focus, the knitting flew. I find that to often be the case with striped socks, but still. I actually added a bit of length to the legs of these socks, both because I wanted to minimize my leftovers and because it’s really cold out and a little extra protection from the draught is a good thing.

These are just my basic 68-stitch, top-down, tight-gauge (9 sts = 1 inch) socks, with 2×2 ribbing at the top and a slip-stitch heel. It’s a formula I use a lot, but in the last six months or so I’ve nailed down the fit of the foot to pretty much perfection, resulting in socks that fit so well I forget I’m wearing them (even at the end of a long day of walking there’s no sagging or movement).

What really makes these socks worth such a (now) lengthy post, though, is the yarn, Nomadic Yarns Twisty Sock. These stripes are so evenly dyed, with such nice blending between the colours, that with not a lot of effort on my part I ended up with a perfectly matched pair. I have another decidedly Christmasy skein of this yarn in my stash, but now that these are off the needles and seem to be wearing well, I think ordering a few more is a good investment. Goodness knows that, with winters like this starting to feel like the norm, more socks won’t go to waste.