Well, after many color issues, I finally got started on my argyle socks.  I ended up getting Calypso Heather for my lighter blue.  It is tad on the green side, but I like the way it looks with the Marine heather.

I’ve never done Argyle before, and I’ve never done socks flat. I’ve also never done any project on these tiny needles.  I’ve done Intarsia before, but only with 3 color blocks.  This sock has 9 color groups.  There are a lot of firsts here, so it should be interesting.

I am having fun with this project.  I’m also learning a lot as I go.  I decide to knit the white lines as I go, instead of doing a duplicate stitch later.  When I first started, I actually had 13 color groups, as I had a different yarn for the black on either side of the white line.  I learned later that it is much easier to cary the color over the white line, and eliminate 4 yarns.  That’s a lot less to get all tangled up.

I also learned early on to not untangle the yarn unless absolutely necessary.  Just looking at the sock causes the yarn to form a tightly woven birds nest.  It’s better to just let the yarn tangle all up, and keep on knitting.  If it gets too difficult to work, untangle it then.

I experimented with bobbins as well.  I got some of those little plastic ones.  They worked well, but made the tangling much, much worse.  They ended up just being a nuisance, as I had to keep unwinding yarn from them.  I tried the figure-eight center pull windings.  I’ve used them before on Intarsia with a lot of success.  They too just got in the way here.  I finally settled on just letting the yarn run free.  I pull 2 to 3 yards (or meters for the metrically inclined out there) from the ball, and cut it off.  Then just let it hang while knitting.  The nice thing about his method, is it makes untangling quite easy.  Just pull each yarn out of the tangle.  Give them a pull, and they come right out.  It also helps to keep the whites shorter than the rest.  There are very few white stitches, so you don’t need much.

Here is a picture of the sock so far:

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 26th, 2008 at 10:04 pm and is filed under Knitting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.