These socks are being used as a Round 3 Bonus design for the 2022 Sock Madness. They will be available when the completion is over in May.

OK, I’ll admit it; I’ve always adored colorwork socks. I cut my (knitting) teeth on traditional Fair Isle and Nordic type designs and I still knit and design with motifs that fall into those categories. But lately I’ve been branching out to motifs that repeat, but are NOT horizontal. They repeat, but step up each time and then interlock together for a quite different overall appearance. They can end up looking kind of random or chaotic or appear as a high or low spiral of some sort. What fun!

And of course, the charts get complicated and significantly larger; following them is much more of a thinking challenge. So now I am well and truly addicted to these spiraling patterns. I’m designing large and small ones with basic or complicated shapes, some even tip the balance to being tessellated. A big bonus is that since these types of patterns spiral (lean) as the shapes repeat, they can be flipped to generate a mirror image that leans in the other direction quite easily. These mirror images can be subtly different or quite striking depending on the motif itself.

…So I went a little overboard with this pair of socks. Not one, but two of my original non-horizontal designs are presented. Then I flipped each of them. The left leaning versions are segregated onto one sock and the right leaning versions are on the other sock for some subtle mirroring action…so that’s up to 4 patterns now. I wanted to keep the patterns distinct so each transition is marked with a horizontal border stripe pattern. 5 patterns. Whew!

And then we come to the heel. That got changed up from my old faithful heel flap, too-- I had occasionally seen some triangular heels online here and there and been intrigued; here is my version that I call a Wedge Heel. After a fair amount of test knitting on numerous other socks this past year, and working out stitch counts, placement and design of the colorwork, I’ve come to this double wedge design. They contribute nicely to a roomy ankle AND as an added plus: there are no heel flap stitches to pick up!

I think the resulting socks have an air of a tribal or ethnic pattern from long ago. Those gradual spirals really triggered something in my memory from grade school, so after a bit of cogitating I managed to dredge up the memory and I named these socks for the stepped tower/temple from ancient Mesopotamia, the Ziggurat.

These socks are knit top down using two solid colors of fingering yarns. Please be sure to use strongly contrasting Dark and Light colors. Choosing yarns that are variegated or not strongly contrasting will obscure the pattern. The heel is mostly worked integrally and thus cannot be worked in a separate color. As always: when working a colorwork pattern that contains floats (and there are a few here and there in these socks), care must be taken to expand stitches as you knit so that the resulting sock is not too snug to pull on over the heel.

I knit socks on 4 DPNs at a time, I have attempted to generalize my instructions for folks who use other needle set-ups.