With Charts Made Simple in the printer’s hands, I’m kind of at loose ends. Tasks that had been sucking up gobs of time are now completed, but I’m not ready to start anything new. Just the thought of beginning a large project—book or otherwise—gives me the heebie-jeebies at the moment.
So instead I’m looking to tie up loose ends. One of them is Corrine.
Corrine
Loose ends indeed. I designed these socks a year (or more?) ago, knit them mid-summer, had them tech-edited in September… and only just now made the pattern available through Patternfish.
Don’t think for a minute, though, that dragging my heels on this project means I don’t love these socks, because I do love them. It’s the stitch pattern that really turns my crank.
Clematis, coming to a point
Named Clematis, I found it while leafing through an obscure stitch dictionary. Bits of ribbing mix with decreases that sway in and out. Yarn overs keep the stitch count constant, but don’t take center stage. The resulting honeycomb fabric has an incredible squooshy, sproingy feel. I was excited by the find—I knew immediately Clematis was perfect for socks.
(Ironically, a couple weeks later I found the same stitch pattern in Barbara Walker’s A Treasury of Knitting Patterns, under the name Hourglass Eyelet Pattern. I’ve pored through that book a million times. Why didn’t I ever notice the stitch pattern there?? Go figure.)
For fun, I wrote the pattern with a choice of two cuff treatments.
ruffled cuff
The ruffled cuff makes use of one of my favorite sock-knitting tricks, courtesy Lucy Neatby’s Cool Socks, Warm Feet: for a totally non-restrictive cast-on edge, cast on twice the number of stitches you need; after a round or two, decrease down to the “real” stitch count. Of course, you can go nuts and cast on four times the stitches you need, and gradually decrease over a few rounds—that’ll give a more pronounced ruffle. But I like the subtle ruffle you see with the Corrine sample above.
knotted cuff
The second cuff option, the knotted cuff, makes use of the Channel Islands cast-on. If you ask me, it’s a totally underrated cast-on: attractive, supremely sproingy, and fun to do. More knitters ought to know it—which is why I included complete instructions in the pattern. The effect here is of soft knots, almost like reverse single crochet.
sigh. I wonder what other little things I might get done, while in limbo between big projects.
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