At one point in time I think there were over 700 people knitting the Monkey sock pattern on Ravelry, currently there are over 5000 projects. I always thought they were cute, but never had any real desire to knit them and kind of stayed away since they seemed so popular. I have that tendency, to want to be anti-whatever is popular at the moment. Remnant of my rebellious teen years? Maybe, maybe not…
Anyhow, that was how I felt until I saw this Cherry Tree Hill sock yarn in “Tropical Storm“. I saw it and the Monkey immediately sprung to mind as a great pattern to knit with it. It looks lovely so far and it’s heavenly to knit with.
After I finished the first sock I ran into a problem. I had been knitting the socks with my 5” Brittany Birch size 1 dpns. I’ve never been a huge fan of them, as they are bendy and break easily, however I like the 5″ size. Unfortunately, one of them broke when I was about halfway through the foot, so I was left with only 4 needles, doable, but not my favorite way to knit. (Note: I have already written them for replacements once before, and this was my replacement set. Luckily they sent me a full set of 5 needles. Unfortunately, this is the 6th needle I’ve broken.) At the same time I lost my 7″ Bamboo size 1 dpns AND my friend who borrowed my size 1 circs has not returned them yet. So I sucked it up and knit on 4 needles for the cuff. I couldn’t stand it though so I finally broke down and bought the Lantern Moon Sock Stix. They were $20, but worth every penny. I LOVE them. They are so smooth and sturdy. It’s such fun to knit with them. However, changing needles resulted in a change in gauge. And this is what the result looked like:
Do you see how the yarn is pooling and flashing on the second sock? I was not happy with that at all. It was also smaller than the first sock. I tried a couple of different remedies. I frogged and switched back to the Brittany dpns using only one Lantern Moon. Still too small and pooling. I frogged again and tried consciously knitting more loosely. Still more pooling. I frogged and tried knitting tightly on 2s. No pooling, same size as the first sock, but the stitches were visibly bigger. I gave up, frogged for the third fourth time, reskeined it and let the yarn sit for a day. It was bizarre, I’ve never had problems like that before with socks. Sometimes the second sock is a little tighter, but nothing that visible. I was so frustrated. I decided to take a break and started working on a hiking sock from recycled yarn.
Last night I was worried that I would end up with second sock syndrome so I balled the yarn and started knitting again. I decided to just us the Lantern Moons and try just knitting loosely. I don’t want to jinx myself, but so far so good. I’m about one pattern repeat into it and no pooling, flashing, and it’s about the same size. I’m not sure exactly what the difference is, but we shall see with the final product! No more frogging for me!
Fresh Ground Knits 