"It's like butter!"

Even though I have a lot of projects going, and I have little time (especially this week - have more meetings tomorrow night) to work on stuff, I wanted to start on something new.

So I pulled out a sock pattern I've been hanging on to for a while, and the yarn I bought for it. (I rarely buy yarn specifically for a certain pattern, but in this case I did. Usually I buy the yarn in a color I like or yarn that is a particular fiber combination I want to try out, but this time I saw the pattern, had seen the yarn for sale somewhere, and realized I needed THIS yarn for THAT pattern.)

The pattern is from a back issue (May/June 2008) of Piecework. It's been reprinted in their "Knitting Traditions" special issue for this year, so you can get it there if you want it and don't have it.

It's called "Lace socks to knit" and was designed by Ann Budd. It's a cabled-and-lace pattern, very pretty, very feminine. In the original issue, the socks were in a pale pink, but I wanted this very light yellow for them.



Not the best representation of the color, but at least the stitches show up nicely. The color is called "Butter Peeps" - it's a very soft, very light yellow with a little pink shaded on it here and there. (It's one of the Dream in Color yarns - they tend to be somewhat idiosyncratically named. I presume the Peeps part refers to the marshmallow Peep chickens (which some people absolutely loathe but which I am really rather fond of - and as candy goes, they are not even all that high in calories! And, if you don't like Peeps "au naturel," try putting them on a plate and zapping them in the microwave for 5 or 10 seconds...they soften up and have a very different texture, and, I think, more flavor))

This is about one repeat (plus a couple more rows) of the main pattern, along with the little bit of the top-of-the-cuff pattern it has you do. This represents an hour's work from last night, and maybe 15 minutes from Monday (if you were wondering how long socks take to knit...) I like patterns like this, though, where you keep track of where you are by row number, rather than being told "Knit plain for 3"" or some such. (Part of it is that being told to "knit plain" means it's just kind of uninteresting, but also part of it is that with a row-by-row lace or cabled or even just knit-and-purl pattern, you can see the pattern develop, and that motivates me to keep knitting on them).