K'done: Euclid Socks

Huzzah! Another round of the Tour de Sock completed!



Pattern: Euclid, by General Hogbuffer
Yarn: Remnant odds and ends - some Yummy Yarn Studio (mid and light purple), some Lorna's Laces (dark purple)
Needles: 2.25 mm / US 1



I did finish these on time - in fact, I was finisher #40. I just got busy and never had a chance to blog them. For, well, nearly two weeks. But here they are now!

This pattern is really clever - rather than make a tube with a bend in it, you create and join together several triangles that wrap around the foot and leg. I suppose it could be called modular, since you only work a single triangle at any given point, but you don't work all the triangles first and then seam them together. Instead, you work the cuff, then work the first triangle off that cuff, then pick up some stitches from that triangle to create the second triangle, then pick up some more stitches...and so on and so forth.

If you don't like picking up stitches, you will hate this pattern with a fiery passion rivaled only by twin suns.

Or you'll just use a provisional crochet cast on. I don't know how to do that, so I picked up. I don't hate picking up stitches anymore though (for a while I thought it was the fiddliest thing ever), so it was all just fine. (In fact, I sort of like picking up stitches now.)

It's very neat to watch the sock develop as you create ever more triangles. The heel flap is longer than one would expect, in order to match up, stitch-count wise, with the triangles that are adjacent to the heel flap, and the heel turn ends up rather pointy, as it is yet another triangle:



Furthermore, if one has sensi-soles, you may want to skip the triangles on the foot portion of the sock - I haven't worn mine out into the world yet, but I did walk around a tiny bit in my house when I was wearing them to take these pictures, and you can totally feel the double decreases underfoot. It didn't bother me at the time - we'll see how I feel about them after I've been out and about in them for a day.

This pattern also produces a rather large number of ends to weave in - two for each triangle, plus the cuff and toe. (The heel flap on mine doesn't get counted because I used that same length of yarn to do the heel triangle - if you were to do your heel turn and heel flap in different yarns, then you'd have two more ends.) A quick count of my socks gives me 14 pieces per sock, yielding 28 ends to weave in. That's a lot of ends for socks. Plus, you can't really weave the ends in as you knit - the way each triangle finishes demands the use of a tapestry needle, and the tails from the beginnings of each triangle need to be left dangling so that you can use them to neaten up the points where several pieces meet - otherwise you'd end up with holes there.

I didn't find these particularly quick to work up, but they are fun, and I'm quite pleased with the results - I think there may be more of these in my future to burn up some more of my sock yarn odds and ends. Each triangle took roughly 3 g of yarn for me.

That being said, each time I finished a triangle, I thought: Yay, I'm done! Oh, wait, not really. It does sort of wear on a person after a while. I think, though, that maybe it wouldn't be so discouraging if one weren't in a race.

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