Pause

Having finished the Sock Madness Round Two sock on time, I advance! I'm quite pleased, both with the socks and because I really wanted to get beyond Round One. I have a feeling I may not get beyond Round Two, but that's OK, I just wanted to progress beyond Round One.



The socks are Echoes by Liz Harris, worked in red Fortissima and white Sock-Ease. While I do admire stranded colorwork, I'm not a big fan of socks with stranded colorwork all over because it's always a struggle to pull them over my heels. But there are the happy exceptions. On these socks, I particularly like the tumbling hourglass motif, the way the stitch pattern remains coherent at the end-of-round jog, and the nice framing stitch that keeps the gusset decreases tidy. Clearly a thoughtful, technically excellent design. The yarns are recycled from two other projects, dating from 2008 and 2012, and I'm pleased they could finally be reclaimed and put to use. They work well together, I think.



The striking stitch pattern seemed vaguely heraldic to me, and I decided I wanted the MC (red) yarn dominant over the CC (white) yarn. It's more usual to have the CC dominant, but I like the results (and of course have to show them off). Here's the leg stranding.



Because I was speed-knitting, sometimes often late at night, and this week riveted by the news from Paris, sometimes I accidentally reversed the yarn dominance, which is easy to see on the wrong side of the pinstripe sole. (See the red lines among the white?) On some projects I'd feel a compulsion to tink back and fix that, but in this case I uncharacterically shrugged and knit on! For gentle readers unfamiliar with the concept of yarn dominance (some prefer the term color dominance), here's two helpful explainers.



Meanwhile, my computer migration is mostly done, but instead of the unalloyed joy of having a fast new computer I have the odd feeling that for a user like me peak utility has come and gone and, like AutoCorrect, future innovations are frequently going to be annoyances. (Although it might be nice to have a car that parallel parks itself.) As if to underscore that, when I was posting photos of Echoes to my Ravelry project page, a requirement for advancing in Sock Madness, the link from Flickr to Ravelry malfunctioned. The workaround I used was acceptable, obvs, but argh.

For observant Christians, today is the pause before the deep dive that is the culmination of Holy Week: Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter. For others, maybe there's the hope of landing an invitation to an Easter feast, which this food writer dubs "Spring Thanksgiving." While that's a novel notion to me, this year I'm going to go with it.