Rainbow socks! For the happiest happy feet that ever happied!
Needles: 2.5 mm / US 1 1/2
Honestly? I didn't know I needed rainbow socks in my life. I didn't feel like there was a hole, there. Even when I saw this yarn, I thought it was pretty, and would knit up in interesting ways, so I bought it, and then cast on pretty promptly - the contrast of the grey bits with the bright pops of colour called to me.
I was pleased to see the colours actually arrange themselves in a rainbow that spiraled around in a fairly consistent way - not perfectly so, especially not across the two socks, and I checked my gauge and it wasn't my knitting that changed it, it's just the variability that comes with handpainted yarn. Still, I was mightily enchanted as I knit on these, and enthusiastically showed them to Mister whenever he got within the right radius. His comments were typically: "Very nice." and "Very retro."
That second comment sort of struck me. I hear "retro" and I think of the 70s, but I quickly realized I agreed with him - these socks do indeed have a retro-ey vibe to them, but not 70s retro. 80s retro. We were both kids in the 80s, and have memories of things festooned in rainbows, with some pale, neutral-ish colour to offset the bright colours. I had a little heart-shaped bag, in a sort of pale peachy-pink canvas fabric, that had a Care Bears logo on it - and one of the bears, I don't really remember which one anymore, how terrible is that? It was probably Cheer Bear - she had the rainbow on her tummy, and I had a Cheer Bear plushie, so it may have given to me with that in mind - though it might have been Tenderheart Bear, since he was the leader. The bag had a rainbow strap, and I filled it with some plastic beads someone had given me - lots of little round translucent plastic beads, cut to look like faceted gemstones, in a rainbow of colours. My sister and I spent many hours playing with those beads - not stringing them into bracelets or necklaces or anything, just playing. We'd group them by colour, then regroup them in rainbow progressions, then pretend they were sentient beings and make them have adventures. (No, not the sorts of adventures where they might get lost - we were young, but we understood that lost things can't always be replaced, so the best course of action was to take care with your stuff.)
The more I think about it, the more rainbows pop up associated with the toys of my childhood. There are the obvious ones - the Rainbow Brite dolls, for example - but rainbows featured heavily in the world of My Little Pony, and Rose Petal, and all sorts of cartoons and books that would have been around.
So yeah. That kind of history gives these socks a pretty distinctively 80s vibe.
Tech specs: socks were worked over 60 sts (at a gauge of about 8.25 sts to the inch), with an Italian tubular CO, Fish Lips Kiss heel, and a wedge toe that decreased until 20 sts remained before Kitchenering closed. I worked toe decreases every other round, except I put in one extra plain round between the first and second set of decreases; no plain round after last set of decreases before Kitchenering.
I...I kind of think I might need more.
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