Danube Socks - Take 2

These socks were started back in the summer of 2012, as part of Janel Laidman’s knitterati sock club.  This was right around the time that she developed other interests and vanished from the knitting scene for a while.  There were some questions about the pattern, which I’m not sure were ever answered.  I left the partially knit sock and the yarn in a sock project bag that had come as part of the club, on the floor, with some other stuff for a decade.  When I finally cleaned up that pile I discovered that carpet beetles had gotten at the yarn.  I cleaned it up and unwound the cake to see how bad the damage was, with the result in the picture above.

I am on a bit of a mission to finish up some of these old projects that have been lingering for a long time, or else frog them if I don’t want to finish them.  In the case of these socks I decided to finish them.  I do like her patterns.  At first I thought I would stash dive, as I do have an awful lot of fingering yarn in my stash, but in the end I decided to see if I could find some more of the same yarn, even if I could not get the same color.  I did find some and ended up buying 4 skeins of different colors to get free shipping figuring I can use them for other sock patterns that I have.  I settled on a color called Sea for this pair.

I have recently knit two pairs of socks (Celestial and Void) and determined that I needed more stitches in the cuff to get a good fit thanks to the fact that I walk a couple of miles every day.  For those socks I had cast on 16 mores stitches than the pattern called for, bringing the cast on to 80 stitches.  For this pair I decided to add 18 stitches bringing the cast on to 78 stitches.  I was using the original needles that the pattern called for (2.5 mm), but when I tried on the cuff after knitting a few rows I discovered it was way too big.  On trying on the original cuff again I determined that it fit, but the stitches were hugely distorted.  I decided to go down a needle size and see if that worked better, and it did.  I still have to figure out how I am going to adjust the pattern to take account of my extra stitches, and when I need to decrease to get a good fit, but so far I like how they are knitting up.

Pattern:  Danube by Janel Laidman

Yarn:  Dirty Water DyeWorks Lillian in Sea

Needle:  US 1 (2.25 mm)