My sister-in-law and dear friend Heather is a collector of mismatched socks. Over the course of several Christmases, she’s amassed about two dozen socks, each with a different geometric pattern in a mix of bright colors, no two the same.

They’re undeniably funky and fun, but they’re just an ordinary cotton/nylon blend, and many of them are getting a bit thin. I thought she’d appreciate a fun new pair of socks that’s a bit warmer and more cushy. Since there’s no force on earth that could compel me to attempt intarsia in round (shudder) I figured a speckled yarn is the next best thing, they definitely go together, but they can’t exactly be said to be the same, either.

I tried knitting them using magic loop, but I was getting ladders so I switched to bamboo DPNs instead. I went up a needle size but otherwise knit the pattern as written, casting on 64 sts to start.

When knitting the heel flap, it gives instructions for two rows, then instructs you to “repeat these last two rows a total of 16 times.” This phrasing is slightly unclear to me: when I think of repeating something, I don’t count the initial doing of it as part of the repeating. So I knit the two rows, then repeated them 16 times, for a total of 17 instances of those two rows. But I’m not sure that’s actually what was intended; when it came time to pick up stitches, it seemed like I had too many available to pick up through. Next time, I’ll just knit those two rows 16 times total.

To deal with the large gaps I had where I picked up between the heel flap and the sock body for the gusset, I followed the advice from an old Ask A Knitter article. It didn’t completely eliminate the gap for me, but it did reduce the size of it pretty significantly.

I goofed slightly on one of the gusset decreases on one of the socks, accidentally making the decrease at the boundary between heel flap and gusset instead of one stitch away. It’s only visible if you know what to look for, and doesn’t interfere with the size or shape at all, so I haven’t spared it a second thought.

The Craft Yarn Council of America’s size chart for feet was not hugely helpful to me, since shoe sizes and sock sizes are not the same thing, and both are shown as overlapping in their charts. I took a gamble and decided I was shooting for socks to fit a 10-inch-long foot, and knit until the foot measured 8 inches (2 inches less than desired, per the instructions) before decreasing for the toe and using Kitchener stitch to finish the whole thing off.

Luckily, they fit great and Heather loves them! My only regret is that the yarn doesn’t have any nylon in it (it was chosen more for its color than its composition), so I don’t know how long they’ll last before they start to felt. Heather has informed me, however, that she’ll be happy to take another pair when these ones wear out. XD