laxton's superbs

As a child I was slightly overexposed to Pacman and underexposed to sunlight and fresh air and stuff, so I've always been entranced by glowing brightly coloured fruit. Long term blog readers may have already suspected this. The first thing I planted in the garden when we moved house a couple of years ago was an apple tree, followed closely by a pear tree, a cherry tree and a plum tree. Was strangely tempted to leave a trail of power pills between them all. Anyway, the apple tree was a Laxton's Superb, and I was very taken by the vivid colours of the fruit, with its bright swirls of green and pink. So when I saw the Red Delicious socks in last summer's Knotions I immediately queued them, then pondered about how I could personalise them a bit to pay tribute to my little tree. Tricky. Fortunately Kate from Green Eyed Monsters kindly indulged me in my appley fantasy with some custom dyed sock yarn. It's a 3-yarn stranded sock - the other plain white and dark green yarns were leftovers, Regia I think, from the bottom of the sock yarn drawer.


I loved knitting these, stranded colourwork is so satisfyingly intricate, and the variegated yarn gave it that little element of randomness to make each repeat of the apple pattern feel unique. The soles are particularly pleasing with their dense stripes, and with such a tiny colourwork unit they look relatively neat. My tension for the rest of the socks is all over the shop, even after blocking, because these socks have been my carry-around-everywhere project. I can see from here the bit I knitted in the Kings Arms, which is much more, er, 'relaxed' than the rest of the sock. I have been rather busy of late so have been trying to make the most of what knitting time I get. There are tiny bits that were knitted on buses and trains and platforms and waiting rooms and basically anywhere I got a spare minute, and to be honest it doesn't annoy me that it all looks different because I enjoyed the whole thing so much it pleases me to remember the creation of all its component parts. The dodgiest looking bit in my view is the toe, which is considerably baggier than the rest of the sock. It might just be me, but going back to one colour after the stranded section made the fabric much looser. So for other knitters, it might be an idea to go down a needle size for the toe, as the author suggests for the cuff. I'm not too bothered though as I'm a compulsive toe-wiggler, and this facilitates my irritating habit. And even though the socks are slightly silly it's not possible to put them on in the morning without grinning foolishly.