Longing for some Christmas in July and needing short socks for my ankle boots, I tried to find a pattern that I envisioned in my mind. I was looking for a tree with a “star on top.” Unsuccessful, I went to my stash yarn and found some green and red yarn and played with ideas to create a pattern on my own. My “star” became a bobble in a separate color on top of a tree. Instead of carrying the yarn for the bobbles, I decided to use four separate strands, one for each bobble to keep the socks stretchy. The first bobbles were too large, so I found a method to make a smaller one that worked. I played around with different ideas for the trees and decided on a simple lacework design. Since I had extra stitches to work with in the round, but not enough for an extra tree, I thought it would look nice to separate each with a border pattern. I took out my favorite stitch pattern book, Japanese Knitting Stitch Bible, and found a pattern that I thought would look nice that I could also continue down the instep. The result became my Festive Tree Sock pattern. This pattern is perfect for stash diving. You don’t need much of the contrasting color, so a mini skein would work fine.

These socks are worked cuff-down on double-pointed needles. The small size has a three-stitch border while the medium and large sizes have a seven-stitch border. If you choose to knit the size small, the border will look slightly different without the purl stitch on either side of the border.