At an impasse

I've reached an impasse.

It's no secret I'm not a fan of the toe up sock. I gave it the old college try for Sockdown and I'll admit that I really like the toe I used and the heel was certainly passable and probably would even get better with practice. The selling factors for toe up socks seem to be twofold. First, you can try the socks on as you knit them so you know they fit. Two, you can knit until you run out of yarn so you never have to worry about running out before you finish.

Let me tackle these selling points. As far as trying them on goes, I've never had problems trying on my socks as I knit because I knit on two circs and can try them on anytime. Trying on toe up socks is more tricky. I've found that I'm done with the toe increases long before I'd know if the sock fit or not. If I didn't know better and know how many stitches I normally need for a sock, I'd keep increasing until I reached the widest part of my foot. It doesn't seem possible that the sock will fit when I stop with the toe increases but later on - quite a few inches into the foot - I find that the socks does, indeed, fit. Sort of. I probably could have left out at least 4 stitches on the Garter Ribs and these socks would have fit a little better.

While it is true that you can just continue knitting until you run out of yarn and not worry about having a toeless sock, it is not true that when you run out of yarn your sock will necessarily be complete. I knit and knit the leg until I ran out of yarn and found that I have a leg that is only 5.5 inches long. That simply doesn't work for me. It doesn't work any better, in fact, than finding out I don't have enough yarn for a toe.

I suppose I could show you a picture of my unfinished sock here but I thought Lucy was much cuter. I love the Artyarns Ultramerino4. This is some nice yarn and I will definitely knit with it again. Thank you SP for introducing me to it. Simply Sock Yarn sells this same yarn and they have a great feature where the description of every variegated yarn includes what solid yarns match with it. Cool, huh? I've ordered some matching teal yarn to finish the cuffs of my socks.

Here's where I'm at an impasse. I've decided to wait for the teal yarn to arrive (and of course it has friends because who the heck can order one skein of yarn?) to finish the cuff of the first sock before casting on for the second. I'm just like that. Sadly, my other size 1s are in use for my Good Juju socks so I have no spare 1s to cast on with. That's okay. I'm good with waiting. Really. That's what I keep telling myself.

Because I can only knit the Good Juju socks during Red Sox games I had to cast on another sock while I'm waiting. I'm using some Bearfoot I had in the stash and some 2.75 needles that weren't being used for anything. They'll make great socks to take along to soccer/football/baseball games this fall (more about ALL that in another post) and I can put them aside when the Artyarns arrives.