Sunday 21 June 2009

too much to ask?

Yesterday, this happened. All in one go. It was so quick and fun and easy. Start to finish, straight through.


(I can't foot model, because it's sized for an eight-year-old. Although it looks a bit bootie-ish, when it's on a foot, the foldover top does that very shallow ankle sock thing that is very cool. Also, I was accused of buying horrid plasticky yarn because of the candy colour. I am here to tell you not only is this lovely lovely wool, but it has aloe vera magically infused into it by the aloe vera pixies, so it is a Good Thing and Nice Yarn and you can throw it in the washing machine to boot).

So today I started the second sock.

Now some people, when they use these self-striping yarns, don't see a need to match stripes; stripes fall where they may. I am not one of these people. Socks gotta match. They're socks. Matching is what they do. They're called a
pair of socks. And the truth is, a self-striping pattern on yarn repeats itself, so all you have to do is take the trouble to find where the repeat is, and start there. Which I did. Light pink bit, followed by red bit, dark pink, light pink. Cast on.



Yeah. You see it too, right?








I didn't see the red bit didn't match until I was way down. But, I thought, must be me, because look - further down the pink bits match up perfectly:








So, I thought. I can just unwind a bit of the top to shrink the red bit, because the rest clearly matches.

Then I got to the pale pink bit here:




So, I thought.


So.


So I picked the incredibly wrong bit of the pattern to start at. I unwound the ball to find where the repeat really started, so I could just start again there.


I could not find it. I decided to just continue knitting, because then I would see where the repeat was, and I would make that the start, and undo the inches I already did, and carry on from there.


Dudes,
there is no repeat. I have knitted a thousand yards of sock, and the pattern hasn't repeated. This is completely inexplicable to me. I even turned it upside down, because I thought that might make it match. It doesn't.


Socks match.

What is going on?

What am I to do?


3 comments:

Karen said...

But they're such pretty socks Ambs...do they really need to match perfectly? They've got all the same colours....you could say they're from your Picasso period....

zircon11 said...

Candy colours though they might be, they are very attractive, and maybe you could just hope the eight-year-old has ever-so-slightly mismatched feet. After all, absolutely utterly exactly completely matching extremities is an evolutionary improbability, isn't it? Who in the world has identical (mirror-image)feet?
But yes, I know, the idealist and artisan within abhors unevenness...

Amber said...

Karen. They NEED to MATCH. Lynndy. I am going to tell the eight-year old's PARENTS that YOU said her feet were mismatched, and unleash their parental WRATH upon you.

In other news, I found the repeat. So we're good to go.