My latest pair of socks.

I was trying to think of a word to describe the colour. It’s sort of a muted brownish red.

In a book I recently read someone got a new coat, the brownish-red colour of which his fashion-conscious friend found incredibly offensive because

It was puce. There was no denying that. It was well fitted, well styled, with a most pleasing swing to the tails, and it was a deep tone that could not be explained away as brown, or red, or anything but puce.

The English language has no shortage of fancy words for colours where other languages make do, and I thought I’d come across most of them by now. I wasn’t familiar with puce, though, so I didn’t understand why it would be so objectionable.

It turns out that the colour is called “puce” (which is French for “flea”) because supposedly it is the colour of bloodstains on bedsheets after a crushed flea. Which is actually kind of icky.

Now I can’t get that idea out of my mind when I look at these socks. But I still like them.

These new socks are growing on me. I wasn’t too impressed with them when I had just finished them, but now I rather like them.

They pair well with all sorts of clothes because of the speckled colour mix. They go well with yellow, or brown, or blue-and-white, or even dark purple.

And the brioche knitting makes me feel them more than normal socks. I’m conscious of them when I walk around in them on bare feet. It’s almost like a tiny foot massage.

I wanted to knit more fun socks, so I bought some fun hand-dyed yarn.

That’s what I thought I did. But since I haven’t used hand-dyed yarn before, I actually bought hand-dyed yarn that looked lovely before I started using it but that I could only turn into ugly socks.

I’m peeved that I didn’t think to take any photos of the hanks of yarn before I wound them into a ball. But if you run an image search for hand dyed yarn then you can see what they generally look like. Imagine one of those in dark brown with blobs of white, dark yellow and violet. Like crocuses and spring earth.

Rolled into a ball, the large splashes of yellow and purple turned into a speckled mess.

I was somehow hoping that the colours would magically align themselves when I knit the yarn into socks, so I would get distinct splodges of yellow and violet again. An evenly speckled result would also have been nice. But instead the colours only kind of pooled, and I got these awkward, sharp-edged spirals of colour instead. Maybe it doesn’t look too bad in a photo but in real life I found them quite garish and ugly.

All right, what if I mix it up with a solid colour so that the repeats get smaller and mixed up? That might tone down the sharp edges and maybe give me a smoother speckled result.

Nope. Now I ended up with a cross between a Swedish tiger and a diseased leopard. Even more garish than the previous ones.

Maybe the yellow was too bright. How about replacing it with more brown, and doing stripes instead of spots? Not bad, actually. At least this looks more like crocuses and earth, instead of a diseased leopard.

Not bad, until I straightened out the socks to start knitting the toes, and realized that almost all the coloured parts ended up on the sole of the foot, and the yellows and violets only reached the front of the foot at the very end. So the crocuses would all be on the sole of the foot, and I would actually mostly see muddy earth.

Time for my fourth attempt. I went back to yellow instead of brown. And I tried brioche knitting, hoping that this would mix up the colours more and get me that speckled look.

These socks actually turned out pretty OK. Somewhat loud. Not the prettiest. Definitely not what I had hoped for. But at least something that I would choose to wear, rather than leaving them in the back of my drawer.

However since more than half of each sock is yellow yarn (half the brioche plus the entire heel), this pair barely used up a quarter of the variegated yarn. What the heck am I going to do with the rest of it? I don’t need four pairs of these!

The cardigan is now at roughly the same point where I ripped it up last time. Time to try it on again soon.

I’m making good progress on it, and on the socks I’m also working on, with all the online meetings we have. Knitting is the perfect filler activity for meetings where I am mostly a passive participant.

But meetings are only good for a certain kind of knitting: the kind that I can do with half my attention. No measuring or fitting, no casting on new things, no tricky counting. I try to make sure to have at least one of my projects in a meeting-ready state by each morning. I wouldn’t want to end up in an hour-long meeting with no knitting just because I’m stuck behind the start of a heel or something like that.

This work-from-home thing is really spoiling me.

I made no forward progress on the cardigan today because all the time I spent on knitting today went towards fixing an earlier mistake. The lacy pattern has cables, and three pattern repeats ago I twisted half the cables the wrong way. Not a big deal, and it probably wouldn’t even be visible – but if I don’t fix this, I’ll be confused each time I come to the cables, because I won’t be sure which ones are the correct ones.

Fortunately the pattern is made up of rectangular blocks that don’t interfere with each other. I could unravel a vertical column, four stitches wide, fix it, and repeat the process for the other wrongly-twisted cables.

Eric already jokes that half the work of knitting cardigans is about ripping up and starting over. Indeed. Perhaps I should try to do with cardigans as I do with socks: decide on a base pattern and only make minor modifications in it. I would certainly be more productive that way.

Continuing my experiments with knitting socks, I’m trying out socks with anatomically correct toes.

Store-bought socks are symmetrical. The toe area has a relatively straight shape, like a very flat isosceles trapezoid. Industrially made socks always so stretchy that they fit my toes well.

The standard hand-knit sock pattern also has a symmetrical toe in the shape of a slightly curved isosceles triangle. You can see the shape on the leet feet I made to give away, and on these green socks I made for myself. The knitting does stretch to more or less fit, but not as much as store-bought socks. With a thin yarn I find that this puts unnecessary stress around the big toes.

For this pair I tried to match the actual shape of my feet. My big toes are noticeably longer than the second toe, and the front of the foot very definitely follows a diagonal line. I just started to decrease earlier on the outside, and decreased faster on the outside than the inside, and they came out really nice on the first try.

The next step might be to do something about the final rows. The standard sock toe pattern (which this asymmetrical one is based on) ends with a distinct little tip, where the yarn is pulled through the final four remaining stitches. I might look for a different way to finish off that leaves the end a bit flatter.

By the way, did you see the lovely yarn I found for these socks? Hand-dyed sock yarn from Limmo Design in a wonderfully rich, dark yellow colour. The specks of brown are not too loud, but liven up the surface. The shop labels this colour “curry” but it makes me think of honey. Now that I’ve started looking, I find yarns in so many beautiful colours that I’m going to have to make a lot more socks.

Socks are such a great knitting project. Small and fast, uncomplicated once you get the basic pattern down. Knitting a cardigan is a major investment in time. Socks on the other hand almost finish themselves. And there is always a need for more, because they wear out.

I started work on the cardigan again, and then I tried it on, and now I’m ripping it all up again.

I don’t get it. I made a gauge swatch, and measured and counted it carefully. And when I had knitted about 10–15 cm of the cardigan itself, the measurements still matched up nicely. But after 20cm the cardigan felt a bit tighter when I held it around me. And at 30 cm it was clearly way too tight. I’m going to be making the next attempt with almost 20% more stitches.

I am beginning to suspect that knitted fabric behaves differently when there is more of it in all directions. More stitches are pulling at each other, so it doesn’t relax as much. If that is true, then a smallish swatch – even though I follow the advice I’ve found and make mine at least 15 cm across – is never going to give a true view of gauge for the final thing.

I had the same problem with the previous cardigan. The difference was not quite as drastic, but overall the cardigan still came out smaller than it should have done based on the swatch.

The trouble is, it takes so much time to figure this out! If I get the sizing wrong for a pair of socks, I can remake them in less than a week. With a cardigan, it takes months. And for socks I can reuse my numbers for the next pair. But I don’t plan to knit a pile of identical cardigans, so I will need to redo the work every time I want to make another one. I wonder how many cardigans I have to knit before I finally master this and can produce them with predictable sizing on the first attempt.

The mohair yarn is starting to look the worse for wear. It’s getting uneven. If I have to rip this up one more time, I may have to throw out the used mohair yarn and buy more to replace it. The alpaca yarn (in the photo) is smoother and bears the repeated knitting and unravelling better.

I’m picking up the cardigan again, after a break to knit two pairs of socks. I want more socks but I also want a cardigan. The socks are small, easy wins and I’d been putting off this larger project.

Working on it again is a pleasure. I’d forgotten just how soft the yarn was. If I could choose, I might never wear a cardigan in anything other than alpaca or mohair again.

I notice the same with other activities I enjoy. If enough time passes, I forget just how much I normally enjoy them. I wonder if there is a term for this. Sort of the inverse of the Pollyanna principle.

My knitting basket is near-permanently stationed at my desk during working days. Long remote meetings become so much more bearable when I can keep my hands busy.

I wonder what my colleagues think of it. It hasn’t come up in our discussions yet. The knitting is mostly out of view for the camera, but not always. And I’m sure they notice that I’m not looking towards my screen and camera. Then again, it’s not rare for people to have their camera somewhere off to one side, so those folks are never facing the camera, so perhaps my doings don’t look as odd as I imagine.

With all the meetings this week, my sock production is off the charts. I’ve already finished one pair for myself, and started on another pair for Adrian.

This is the first time I use this kind of patterned sock yarn. It’s a really clever idea: the first half of the ball of yarn has exactly the same pattern or colour gradation as the second one, and there is a short marker section in between in a totally different colour. This way you can very easily get two identical, fun socks from one ball. I like it.

This pair I haven’t even properly finished yet – I still have the ends to weave in – but I wore them anyway because today’s outfit, with a green skirt and dark green tights, called for green socks.