Size Matters

This year I received my most challenging commission yet: A request for slipper socks for my niece (not on behalf of my niece, actually from my niece, a girl with absolute faith in my omnipotent powers of knitting).

Socks should be fairly straightforward, after all there are hundreds of sock patterns on Ravelry so you would have thought that I could have come up with something pretty quickly. But, with my usual picky standards in full force, I rejected dozens of candidate patterns. Then my niece found some socks I'd made for her last Christmas and suddenly I knew what to aim for.

The problem with these socks (taken from Cute Knits for Baby Feet) was that they were too small for my niece even before I gave them to her. Cute as they were, the largest size on the pattern was 18-24 months. I thought about trying to adapt the general patterning for a generic sock but I never quite got round to it.

Then, after a couple of months of subtle nagging from my sister (caused by less subtle nagging from my niece) I was struck by a revelation. I didn't need a different pattern, I needed bigger yarn. After all, these were slipper socks, not regular socks.

So I needed something chunky-ish, I needed pink and I needed white. But there's a lot more variety in double knit than chunky and, thanks to another project I was working on (more of that later) I had figured out that double knit doubled is pretty close to chunky.

In the end, I knitted the smallest size in the pattern with some fairly generic Patons double knit, doubled. I had to lengthen the foot but that was all. To say that I was happy with the result is an understatement.

The only problem I had was that distinction between the two colours wasn't great because the pink was so pale. That's when a local craft shop came to the rescue with some irrationally girly ribbon/edging that was both the perfect colour and stretchy.

I'm extremely pleased with the finished socks. And, more importantly, so is my niece!