Chains of Love socks

My stripey socks
Originally uploaded by taikasatama

These are the socks I started with J&B! I love them to bits, I wanted to make them stripe in these thick, spiralling stripes and it worked, yay! As you might guess, the pattern is called Chains of Love and it's a great pattern. I did convert it to a toe-up because that way I had better control on the pooling in the foot.

As for making it stripe, at first I had 68 stitches at 9stitches per inch. Then I realised the stripes weren't moving enough so I reduced to 66 and that seemed to maintain a similar thickness but still kept them spiralling nicer. I actually tried a bunch of numbers here and there, from 62 to 68 but you could easily see when the colours were stacking rightly and when not. As a general hint, the thin stripes happen when you have a smaller number of stitches and you can thicken them by adding a couple of stitches.

(Of course, to make things confusing, if you go over a certain amount of stitches, the spiralling will actually change direction and then the opposite is going to be true. But that's unlikely to happen in socks, apart from perhaps kneehighs)

WIth all this variation in the number of stitches, I added some 1x1 ribbing to the sole. It keeps the fit snug even if the size might change a little bit with these experiments.