Oimelc

Sunny and cold this morning, any groundhog foolish enough to stick his nose out of his den would have seen his shadow. Six more weeks of winter. I never understood why that was a bad thing. Surely, any warm weather before May is an improvement? The celtic day is oimelc (eeee melk) and the Christian Candlemas, each celebrating the coming of spring.

Started a pair of socks last night. I'm using up two colors, doing the toe and part of the leg in one color and the instep and heel in another. I'll do the slip stitch blending pattern on the leg. The needles are size 1 US, yarn is Opal and Trekking and the pattern uses the riverbed architecture and Cat Bordhi's slip stitch rings pattern rows 1-4 for the leg stitches.

Leftover Socks

I used the riverbed pattern, but am having trouble calculating the E, length before starting the arch increases. So the sock is a tad short. I used 54 stitches around the midfoot and leg. I had my denim colored opal to use up, so I divided it in half and started two socks, each on their own needle. I used the magic loop method. I made it to the leg of each sock as the yarn was running out.

I joined the trekking and used a pattern I found in Cat Bordhi’s book. It's called slipstich rings, but I changed it a bit. With the light blue as the MC and the dark blue as the CC, Rows 1 and 2: with CC Knit to end. Rows 3 and 4: with MC, *K2, sl1* to end. This pattern created a sort of ribbing, that is very pleasing. When the Opal ran out I just used the one color.

For the cuff, I decreased 10 st. and did 1x1 ribbing and then used Jeni’s magic cast off.

I like them!

Yarn: Opal, denim and Trekking XXL dark blues
Needles: size 1