Pam Alison Knits

Although I’m mainly working on knits for other people this month, I’ve indulged in a little selfish knitting this weekend. This pair of socks was actually my Christmas Eve cast-on project and I got the first sock completed over the Christmas break with the intention of finishing the project during January.

I’m using one of the yarns I bought in October 2022 at the Knitting and Stiching Show in London. At the time, I found knitting somewhat under-represented at the show, but there were several small stands of beautiful hand-dyed yarns to cater to my appetite, such as Bow Fiddle Yarns. This skein of multi-toned purples and pinks came home with me and has been patiently waiting its turn in the spotlight. It is a nice, smooth, mid-weight sock yarn. By mid-weight, I mean it’s a traditional 4-ply/fingering weight, but yarn can run to the finer end of what you’d consider a fingering, or to the slightly heavier end where it is only slightly thinner than an American Sport-weight. Here in Britain, we don’t traditionally have an equivalent of Sport-weight, though some brands label yarns as “Baby DK” which sit in thickness between our 4-ply and DK weights. So, when I say this yarn is a mid-weight sock yarn, I consider it to be bang-on what I expect from a 4-ply yarn.

It is really nicely dyed, too, with a lovely range from pale rose pinks to rich plums. Shades of Auricula Purple, as my copy of “Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours” would classify it. Just as I find in the ink world, shades of purple are horrible to describe, name, or fundamentally understand. This wool looks almost brown in some photos. I have to resort to photographing the wool against other recognisably purple items in order to illustrate what kind of purple it really is. The socks are the same sort of purple as my Filofax Holborn organiser, which is odd because I think I prefer brighter, clearer purples – like the cover of the William Hannah disc archive in my first photograph.

I remember when I bought it, I thought it too pretty to just use for socks and intended to make something more visible – a neck warmer of some sort, perhaps. Then I bought another sock yarn from a different independent dyer and thought that would definitely need to be used to make somehting like a neck warmer of some sort. Funnily enough, it hasn’t been cold enough yet to need the neck warmers I already own and I haven’t been inspired to knit any more. So, socks it is.

I was very taken with the slip-stitch rib I used for the heel flap on the first sock. You would think, trying an unfamiliar stitch, I would have made a note of how it was worked, or saved directions to the website showing it. Yet I got to the heel of the second sock and basically had to make it up because I couldn’t for the life of me find the instructions. It is these kind of quandaries which prove to me that I should just stick to what I always do because, in the long run, it works and it saves a lot of effort. Popular wisdom dictates “if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always had”, as if that is some kind of bad thing. In my heart, I’m more of an “if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it” type of person.

Thus it is that Sunday night finds me with a thee-quarters complete pair of socks in a brownish plummy purple wool with a slightly frustrating heel construction. Probably best if I don’t push my luck by going to look for possible ways to knit stars into the Star-spangled cardigan right now.