I don’t have enough knitting left on my Engagement Socks to carry me through a week on a motorcycle, and the Purple Lace Shawl is too big to fit in a saddlebag. One of the knitters at Great Yarns heard me say I needed yarn for Honeymoon Socks, and she thought it was a great name for a project.
I want to knit two toe-up socks, so I divided the yarn into two balls. There were roughly 88 sets of colors in the ball; each sock gets 44. I wanted to Knit One Below so I then had to rewind the individual balls so that I could pull off the end and out of the center. That was a bit of a mess.
I cast on one sock ahead of the trip so that I would have time to test and think things through. It’s hard to check the fit of a toe increase when you are wearing motorcycle boots. Four stripes got me through the increases and I will K1B until I get to the heel.
The colors in the K1B will move in opposite directions–one set will be purple-royal-turq-black, and the other will be black-turq-royal-purple. No idea of whether they will move exactly or shift over the length of the sock.
After several stripes of K1B ribbing, I decided I didn’t like the way the stripes were shaping up. The abrupt transition between colors meant there was no shading into or out each color. Slipping one color halfway through the length didn’t change the transition much. Trying to knit K1B when both yarns were black was the last straw. I frogged.
Knit another stripe or two in straight knitting and decided that was boring, so I started doing K1B on the first round of each new color. That’s pretty. Had I not been on a motorcycle, I might have looked up some of Barbara Walker’s slip stitch patterns, but I only had what was in my head at the time. The second sock might be different.
For what it’s worth, I didn’t knit all that much on the actual honeymoon. There was time during the Indian Motorcycle Pow Wow in Cherokee, but once John and I took off up the Blue Ridge Parkway, there wasn’t much sit-around time for knitting.
The cuff on the first sock was growing when I realized that I needed to bring both socks up together to make sure they ended evenly.
The pictures below show the inside and outside of K2P2 ribbing with a slipped second stitch on each change-of-color row.
One heel was knit with short rows as the sock reached that length; the other was cast off, ribbing begun, and then picked up later. Knitting in place with short rows is easier.
