I thought I’d take the opportunity to show you some bad photos (please disregard the unvacuumed rug) of the socks I finished during August. For some reason, my knitting has been really slow this year, so these are only the second and third pairs I’ve finished so far this year:

These are my Fruitcake socks, so named for the colorway of
Wisdom Yarns Marathon Socks–North Pole yarn that I knit them in. They are 60-stitch vanilla socks that I cast on in December during our pre-holiday-lunch all-staff meeting.

They were smooth sailing until the foot of the second sock, when the stellina (that’s the sparkly strand of yarn that’s plied with the wool-nylon blend) clearly started causing problems for the machine when it was being skeined. I’d noticed the stellina was broken more often than usual and then came the knots. The yarn, I assume, had gotten stuck in the skeining machine, they’d cut it and tied it back on. Mostly this is fine. It happens; we know it does. It’s just frustrating in a self-striping yarn where you’ve managed to make a matching pair. Running into a knot that turns the run of a particular color into a different length understandably affects the appearance. Unless you get a little anal and decide to switch to another repeat of the colors to try and sub in, which works, until the next time the problem repeats itself.

Anyway, that’s what explains why the red section on the one toe is longer than the other. But it won’t matter to me and I’ll be happy with my brightly-hued sparkly socks.

This pattern, Sockdolager, was the first round for Sock Madness contenders this year. I had a lot going on at that time and failed to get them finished, but they’re done now! I knit the medium size on 2.25 mm needles. The yarn is Trekking XXL that was among my final purchases from A Tangled Skein before they closed last winter.

This pair was the only one that was finished in time for the Ravelry contest for finishing socks during August (the others were about 90 minutes too late) and, coincidentally, it won a random prize. So they are now award-winning socks!