LoveSock Colourwork

The day I posted about not having the yarn for my March socks was the day the yarn arrived. Since it is a fairly simple sock, I’ve already made some good progress.

LoveSock in progress

It is a striped sock with a colourwork heart on the heel flap. The heart is worked using two colourwork techniques: stranded and intarsia. (The whole thing could be done in intarsia, but that would mean more ends to weave in at the end.) I’ve done stranded work before (like my Temple Cats hat), but I’ve never tried intarsia.

Here’s what the back of the sock looks like:

LoveSock colourwork

The top section is the stranded colourwork, where the different colours are carried across the piece and occasionally twisted around each other so the strands are kept close to the work and don’t potentially get caught in fingers and toes.

The botton bit of the heart is intarisa. Here, I have pink on the left, the multicolour yarn in the middle, and another ball of pink for the right. Each time I switch colours, I wrap them around each other to prevent a hole from opening up, and then continue on in the new colour.

I also made use of a simple trick in the stripes of this sock. If you aren’t carefully, you can get a jog in your stripes where you change colours. However, by slipping the first stitch of the second row of a colour, you eliminate the jog. You are just lengthening that one since, and helping to shift things around so your eye doesn’t notice the difference. TechKnitter has a great piece about jogless stripes.

Jogless Stripes in LoveSocks

And here you can see how I carry the yarn inside the sock, rather than cutting it every time I change colours.

Carrying Yarn in LoveSocks

You might recognize the yarn I’m using for these socks. I knit a pair of socks in January for a lady in Sarnia with the same colours. For these socks, I’m using the other two balls of yarn she had to make her another pair of socks. After these, I think I’m done knitting with pink for a little while. 🙂