Danube Socks - One Cuff Done!

What an ordeal this sock has been!  The first in progress one damaged beyond repair by carpet beetles (that’s what I get for letting it sit around for a decade!), and then started over five more times.  The first time was when I added extra stitches to get a better fit but kept the same needle size and ended up way too big.  The second and third times I went down a needle size and added the extra stitches (cast on 78 and 80, respectively), and then ran into trouble when I got to the pattern and was trying to figure out how to work the extra stitches in, partly because you don’t have the same number of stitches for the front and the back, there is one more for the back.  The fourth time I decided to go back to the original needle size and cast on the number of stitches called for in the pattern, but I also decided to try the two at a time magic loop method.  Ugh, that was fiddly, even after I had worked a few rows and I felt like I was spending too much time adjusting the cord and shifting things, so back to the frog pond I went.

I then decided to add some extra stitches back in, but use the needle size called for in the pattern, so I sat down with my graph paper to figure out the best way to do that.  In the end I added extra ribbing between the motifs on each side, but did not add any extra stitches on the edges (between the front stitches and the back stitches).  I added four stitches to the front and four stitches to the back, a purl and a ktbl between the first and second motif and the second and third motif.  I also redid the charts in my Stitchmastery program, and when I did that I discovered a few things.  The printed chart for the top of the foot did not have the decrease stitches, it had ktbl instead, and the cuff chart row numbering indicated that not as many rows of the ribbing should be worked.  The chart for the top of the foot was correct in the PDF.  The instructions had you repeat row 3 20 times, but the row number of the row following row 3 (both printed and in the PDF) was 10, and I had decided that 22 rows of this ribbing was excessive (after working it 4 times!), and decided to only work 12 rows of ribbing before starting the pattern, which had the happy side effect of avoiding the fit problem on my muscular calves.  I did up the full chart for both the front and the back (33 stitches for the front, and 35 stitches for the back) and combined the top foot chart in with the front chart so it is all together.  That was another thing that was bugging me about the pattern, the cuff chart was only over 20 stitches, so keeping track of the pattern as you went around the cuff was a little bit of a headache, especially as you don’t have the same number of stitches on the front and the back.

Now, on to working the heel and figuring out the construction of the rest of the sock.  Hopefully I won’t have to frog again.

Pattern:  Danube by Janel Laidman

Yarn:  Dirty Water DyeWorks Lillian in Sea

Needle:  US 1.5 (2.5 mm)