Just started the pinstriping on the toe last night.

I like doing pinstriping on socks; it's kind of unexpected. It's much more common to have the row-by-row stripes: knit five rows blue, three rows gray or something like that. It's not as common to have the stitch-by-stitch striping.

But it looks cool. Or at least I think it does. I think I got the concept off of one of the Blackberry Ridge sock kits...you striped the heel and the toe in a two color, 2x2, stitch stripe.

Sometime, I might do a pair of socks that are "all" pinstriped. Maybe pinstriping everywhere but cuff, toe, and heel. Maybe use some kind of busy variegated yarn for one of the colors, just to see what happens. I bet it would be cool.

I'll have to dig around in my stash and see if I have any lone skeins of Lorna's Laces or something - or see if I have enough leftover from some other socks.

Perhaps these will be the next self-designed, designed-on-the-fly socks: solid color/variegated pinstriping. (ooh, I wonder how a self-striping yarn would work on the pinstripes: you'd probably still be able to see the stripes but they'd be wider, by virtue of the fact that you're carrying the yarn every other stitch.)

I'm sort of slowly circling back into designing my own socks again and it feels good. Once I finish up the Bacteriophage socks, I'll post some pithy instructions and make up a little Excel-saved-as-a-.jpeg chart (so I can post it from Flickr to here) of the 'phage. I might even chart up a 'phage attacking a bacterium, although I don't plan to put that on my socks. (I'm not sure how I can make a convincing E. coli using just knit stitches - I don't think I want to portray its center circular chromosome; that would require making it very big. But just drawing a bacteriophage attaching to something that looks like a rectangle might have too much of a "huh?" factor.)

Well, I think my trip to a field site, scheduled for this afternoon, is not going to come off: it is now darker than it was when I drove in about 1/2 hour ago. And they're predicting "severe" storms. (I was really hoping they'd hold off 'til tomorrow - not that I want to ruin everyone's Saturday but there's an outdoor duty I was supposed to do tomorrow that I'd frankly rather not, and having it postponed due to rain would be just peachy. And at any rate: I'd get to the field site and back this afternoon in one piece, without having to hunker down in any bar-ditches while a tornado blows past.)