Most people tend to knit self-striping yarns in stockinette patterns. While on one hand this makes complete sense to me (after all, with self-striping yarns, the colorway is doing all of the work; why mess that up with a complicated pattern?), on the other hand over the last few years I’ve come to find stockinette just this side of tedious. Personally I like to have some small pattern to break it up.

So I started looking for patterns made specifically for self-striping yarns, and along that search starting thinking “what if… what if there was a pattern that… changed patterns every time the color changed?” I could not find a pattern like that, so then I started to wonder if maybe that would be too complicated and fiddly, and that’s why the patterns weren’t out there.

However, the more I thought about it the more I thought it could be done, and thus I set out to prove it – even with limited evidence that my idea would work. I’m now pleased to say that my hypothesis was correct, and changing patterns at every color change is actually kind of nifty.

This pattern is 14 pages long, but don’t let that scare you off! Nine pages of the pattern are charts for all the different stitch patterns.

This pattern is written for toe-up, and has two different heels given. The experienced knitter, though, should feel free to substitute their own favorite method (cuff-down, toe-up, anything!) - this sock pattern is all about experimentation!