Spiral Socks

[firstfrost]

I bought a book (my first knitting ebook) about intarsia in the round. The trick is very clever, and about halfway through these socks, I came to the realization that it doesn't matter where you think the round marker is. That is, I use two circular needles, and I could start with either one, because instead of being a spiral, it's really eight little sub-spiral pieces, and the last one is tucked under the first one, like a folded-together cardboard box top.

The advertisement was "making intarsia easy", and I have to say that it doesn't really do that. Keeping eight bobbins semi-untangled is not easy, regardless of the clever trick.

Flaw one: I should have used a thicker yarn with size 2 needles. It said fingerweight, but for me, it came out a little flopsy. Flaw two: due to some sortof counting error, one toe is a little longer than the other. This never happens with two-at-a-time, but managing sixteen bobbins would have been even more pesky (and two-at-a-time isn't good for patterns where you have to shift the needle boundaries).

But... they really are cool looking.

Comments

[kelkyag]

They are cool-looking!

There are no carries in this? Do you do rounds in alternate directions, or zag each yarn back across its own stripe, or ...?

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the rounds are in alternate directions. At the beginning of the round, you catch up the yarn at the far side in a loop, and then when you get around to the loop, you use that to knit with. So it all twists together the right way, and each yarn is going back and forth across its own stripe.

[kelkyag]

I ... will probably ask you about this again after learning how regular intarsia works in knitting. :)