Hurricane Helix Socks

Hey everybody! Remember when I used to be a blogger?

Oh hahahaaaa, she’s hilarious. Self-deprecating humor is just the best.

Anyway, grad school has eaten away a large portion of my life this fall, but that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been making things. In fact, a good knitting and/or crochet project has been by my side the entire semester, keeping me sane when the cavalcade of school and work and school and work is ready to bury me.

After the “Summer of Socks” wound down (and no, I still can’t divulge any details about it yet), I had an awful lot of extra odds and ends of sock yarn lying around. For years now, I’ve been using these scraps to make tiny squares for a project that Dan and I dubbed FutureBlanket. When we still thought that we maybe might have kids one day, we thought all those tiny squares might become a baby blanket.

However, as years have gone by and we realized that we like our family just the way it is, I’ve just been knitting tons of tiny little colorful squares out of leftover sock yarn to make a blanket big enough for us both to share. One day I’ll lay them all out and see just how big it’s gotten. It’ll be the most beautiful, chaotic, colorful thing I’ve ever made, that’s for sure.

Anyway, my adventures in sock yarn this summer left me with more leftovers than I was used to, either due to the fact that I have a penchant for anklets, or maybe because I got some weird giant skeins. I had way too much beautiful stuff left just to relegate it to tiny squares, but probably not enough to make another pair of socks out of any of them.

Also, although each skein was beautiful in their own right, they really looked weird together. Each one was its own weird mix of blues and greens, but in much different color temperatures and tones. I thought, there’s surely no way these things could look good together, right?

HOT DAMN.

You all know of my love for Grumperina, knitter extraordinaire, and I’ve already waxed poetic about her helical knitting sock pattern in my Triple Helix hat pattern. However, I had never yet taken the plunge and made a pair of helical socks of my very own, using her genius sock recipe.

I’m not sure what took me so long. Maybe I was afraid of short-row heels? No need, not when you have Laura Chau’s amazing short row heel tutorial to guide the way.

I mean, just look at those stripes. Knitters dream of achieving this type of random goodness. There are random stripe generators and flipping a coin, and all kinds of other methods, but apparently helical knitting with 3 different disparate colorways, plus one really beautiful solid, is the trick. The yarns that I used here are Prism Saki in Woodlands, last seen in my Woodland Gyllis scarf, Invictus Yarns Beyond in Tranquility, Lorna’s Laces Solemate in Bayou McNeedles (both of which are in super secret projects you haven’t seen yet), and Valley Yarns Huntington in Grey.

Well, I guess I can let you see a little sneak peek of those super secret socks, right?

Really pretty, right? But you’d never, ever imagine they’d look so good together.

I used the Huntington for the tops, heels, and toes, and I think that’s really the trick to getting all of the colors to mesh together, selecting something that’s just contrast-y enough to let all of those blues and whites pop without muddying up the mix.

The slight bluish cast to the gray really ties the room together, I think.  These beauties have been named Hurricane Helix due to the fact that I finished the majority of the knitting on the night when the entire city of New Orleans went on lockdown, waiting for the ravages of Hurricane Nate, which never really came.

If you’d like to make your own the same as mine, I cast on 64 stitches for a women’s large size and knitted 12 rows of 2×2 ribbing at the top before getting going on the stripes. I made sure that the gray was the first color in the stripe rotation so that it always ended up at the beginning of needle 4 at the end of each set of 4 stripes, which ensured it was always in the right place to start the heels and toes. This probably makes no sense now, but it will when you’re knitting the socks, I promise.

I also used a flat toe construction because that’s my preferred style, but short-row or star toes or whatever else you like would work, too.

So grab your ugliest sock yarn scraps, put them all together with a gorgeous dark solid color, and make yourself some helix socks. You’ll be glad you did.