FAL Finish: Socks For Sarah

This is my final 'must catch up with Q3 finishes' post and I'm now pretending it's the end of September!  I had four knitting projects on my Q3 FAL list, and have finished one of them.  At the start of the quarter, this is what Sarah's socks looked like:

This is the second pair of socks I knitted (the first pair, which I knitted toe up, are here), and I decided to go cuff down for these, so I needed to learn a stretchy cast on and chose the Estonian/Latvian cast on, which looked liked this when the stitches were on the needle:

I needed to slightly change the plain stocking stitch leg and did *four rounds of knit, two rounds of purl, four rounds of knit (and repeated from the *) until the leg was long enough.  This gave me a garter ridge every eight rounds and added a bit of interest.  I was slightly shaping the leg, so the stitch markers are there to remind me to decrease every ten rounds (just after the two purl rounds, which nicely hid the decrease):

I then did a plain stocking stitch heel flap, turned the heel, did the instep shaping and then carried on in plain knit rounds along the foot:

I decided to put the toe stitches onto a piece of yarn and graft both toes at the same time to get the Kitchener stitch embedded in my head.

Despite very careful measuring of both balls of yarn and putting a slip knot and marker in the right place on the second ball, the socks don't match, and I didn't notice until I'd turned the heel on the second sock!  Sarah said they were okay, though, so I left them.

I then grafted the toes, darned in the ends and packed them off to Sarah.  (No, I didn't bother blocking them!)

I really enjoyed knitting them and because they're knitted with double knitting yarn, they went an awful lot quicker than my first (4 ply) pair!!!

Sock details
Pattern: Regia cuff down
Adaptations: added two rounds of purl once in every ten rounds (K4, P2, K4), cast on 60 stitches and decreased by two stitches every ten rounds until there were 48 stitches at the bottom of the leg, missed out the final round of knitting at the toe shaping and went straight to the 'knit round until you reach the beginning of the heel needles' round
Cast on: Estonian/Latvian
Yarn: Adriafil Knitcol 'Beethoven Fancy' (100% wool) (from Love Knitting)
Needle size: 3.25mm KnitPro Symfonie dpns


And that's the end of my finishes for quarter three!  I've made some progress on a couple of other projects on the list and have made something not on my list, so I'll hopefully do a more normal 'what I've been up to' post sometime this week.


The other thing I've done this quarter is a guest post on a friend's (gardening) blog - I hope you enjoy it!

And finally, this is one of my favourite photos of Archie:

Aren't I angelically handsome?

Thanks for popping in!!!