So Much Color – Bayou Shamrock Socks

For some reason, this March has been a flood of much more color than I am used to.

Green, mostly.

Particularly this electric neon green has been sneaking its way into everything good recently, including some lovely socks that I made for my boyfriend’s brother.

Just. Ugh. So good. So green.

The yarn here is just a complete showstopper, and I was absolutely delighted to find out that it’s made by a local dyer. Cat Tails Yarn hails from Covington, LA, and every single colorway is just simply insanely beautiful. I just don’t even understand how there are so many shades of green and brown and rust and yellow in here, space-dyed (I assume?) but never doing any weird spiraling or pooling or flashing somehow. The base is Korat, and the colorway is Irish Channel, part of the Going Down the Bayou collection, hence my clever name of Bayou Shamrock Socks. The fact that I made them right up next to St. Patrick’s Day was just an added bonus.

The pattern is the good, plain sock recipe from Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, if it wasn’t super obvious as my absolute favorite and most-repeated pattern of all time.

To make a size US men’s 10 sock, I cast on 66 sts and did a 3×3 ribbing, splitting it in half to keep the ribs centered going down the instep.

I was just messing around a bit and decided to carry the ribbing all the way down to the toes, just to see what it would be like, and I’m super pleased with it. I think it makes them look more professional, like dress socks? Not sure why, but it was a fun experiment. (Gotta get my continuing sockpocalypse kicks somehow, I guess.)

Slip-stitch heels, obvi.

Ryan is lucky that these socks were a little too big for me, because the temptation to steal them was great. They look like a neon green flower bed that I want to fall face forward into.

Like sunshine and lemonade.

Like hope and springtime.  Fingers crossed.

Tiny Owl Baby Blanket

Is there just something so draining about posting my final post of the year that makes me unable to post anything for the first two months of the next year?

Who knows? Anyway, here’s a cute blanket.

This adorable thing was made for my friend, Megan, who’s having a little girl any day now. She and I were scrolling through patterns on Ravelry, and she was immediately struck by how freaking cute all of these little tiny owls were, and I can’t say I blame her.

I mean, they are so tiny and so cute.

And there’s something about the way that the stitches bend over the eyes that makes them look a little bit sad all the time. I doubt that’s intentional, but it’s certainly delightful.

The pattern here is Owl Baby Blanket by Katie Etheridge. Now, even though this blanket came out super cute, I can’t claim that it was all that fun to knit. For starters, there are some significant errors in the pattern, mostly in the charting but also in the written explanation, that would definitely trip up an inexperienced knitter. I had to hand-correct my own chart to add in forgotten symbols, just to make sure that everything worked out properly.

Secondly, it’s not all that exciting. Since you’re knitting in the round, each round gets larger and larger, taxing your will to live as each round grows to over 600 stitches long.

Of course, I knew this on going in, but with so many rows without much going on (because you only cable on 4 rows of the 28 row repeat, and only get 1 beading row with each one as well) it felt a little tortuous sometimes.

Granted, I had a little bit more going on with my blanket than other people, which brings us to the final point. The pictures of the finished blanket on the pattern itself, and somehow of every other person who’s ever made this pattern on Ravelry, are not what you end up with if you knit the pattern as written. See those purl gutters on each side of the owls that travel all the way up with the cables? It sorts of makes it look like the owls are hiding inside of a larger, more conventional cable pattern.

It’s something I’m a big fan of! It makes the whole thing look like a sort of starburst radiating from the center starting point.

Super clean and obvious straight lines, all kinds of good diagonals playing around with each other!

It’s real good shit, right? Well, it’s definitely there in the chart, with purl bumps on either side of the owls going all the way up to row 28. But do you know where it isn’t?

On any other finished knitted version of the pattern! Everyone else’s pictures, including the pattern writer, have strips of owls with fields of plain stockinette in-between. How? Why? Did the pattern change at some point? Did everyone (including the designer?!) all decide to do this modification at the same time and not say anything? Where are your purl gutters? WHERE?

I need to calm down. I’ll do that by talking about the one intentional modification that I did make. In the original pattern, you knit a few garter stitch rows before binding off. Perfectly serviceable, but boring. I wanted something that was going to look more finished and more professional and not detract from all of the gorgeous symmetry inside the blanket already.

An applied i-cord bindoff fulfills all of these things, plus makes you feel super smart while you’re doing it, even if it means that your bindoff will take you at least three times as long. If you don’t know how to do one, this tutorial from 10 Rows a Day was super helpful (I did the second variation with three stitches), along with this good advice from the great ladies at MDK on turning corners in applied i-cord (except I only did the technique on the stitch before and after the corner, rather than the more involved corner-turn they do here).

And it just looks beautiful all stacked up like that. So good.

You know what else is super good?

All of those tiny beads. Mine are Bead Landing 6/0 glass beads in color 627294. I tried looking it up on Michael’s website (since that’s where I got them), but I hit a dead-end, and I’m not sure if they’re discontinued. Any size 6 seed bead will treat you right, though.

I just really liked the way that the oil-slick-esque color variations in the beads pulled out all of the purples, pinks, and blues in the heathered yarn base. And I completely forgot to tell you about the yarn! It’s Berroco Vintage DK in color 2183, a really lovely heathered, almost tweedy grayish-purple, that is apparently impossible to photograph accurately.

This picture comes pretty close (most accurate would probably be the blocking picture on the mats way back up there), and it really captures the squishy loveliness of the final product. I hope that Megan likes the final product, as that’s really all that matters, not my teetering-on-the-edge sanity when a tiny detail in the pattern is wrong.