I had my DNA tested last year and my daughter was delighted to find out that our maternal haplogroup contains Sami DNA. We had already suspected that this was the case, but it was nice to get confirmation. To celebrate, I made her some red, blue, and white socks using Sami knitting patterns. I don’t have a picture of her socks because she is away at college and she took them with her. I want to make a pair for myself and was happy to discover that I made a chart for the patterns on her socks. The paper instructions are my guesses at how I proceeded.

It is salsa time here at home - my garden has been tossing lots of peppers and tomatoes at me.

Back to the socks: I ran out of red wool, so I thought I would make my socks with hand-dyed wool. The greeny gray is from an iron-mordanted lady’s mantle dye and the blue is the indigo that I rescued from a lime-water induced hell of drabness from which there was no escape but Rit.

Toes are done. I am using my old tried-and-true sock method, but as this yarn is worsted-weight, I am only using 48 stitches per foot. And I am using my old tried-and-true method of making both socks at more or less the same time, to (I hope) avoid ending up with one bigger and one littler sock.

I of course replaced the red yarn with the greeny gray yarn. I am liking how it is looking.

After finishing all of the cast-on stitches, I moved my BOR to the center of the bottom of the foot. This means that the jog between rounds will be at the bottom of my foot, where very few people will be looking.

I used to work hard to carry my colorwork yarns without breaking them, to avoid having to weave in lots of ends. The problem with that method is that I ended up with some unsightly pulling upward on the carried yarns. Breaking the yarn resolves that - and I don’t mind weaving in ends.

Here are my handsome friends, ready for their heels. I am pretty sure that they are about the same size :)

The yarn is slippery and the needles are not real long, so I put the non-heel stitches on waste yarn to save headaches and dropped stitches.

Things are still sliding all over the place, so as I finish the heel, I am going to put All of the Stitches onto a circular needle.

I will go back to using the DPNs now that the heel is done, because there are not quite enough stitches to fit nicely on this 16” circular needle. I don’t want to stretch out my knitting overmuch.

You know how, when you knit colorwork, you are supposed to keep the dominant color in the left hand and the background color in the right hand? Well, first of all, I radically hold both colors in my left hand, though I do keep the background color on the right (that is, the background color’s float floats behind the dominant colors float. Yes.). And second of all, with a pattern like this, you cannot maintain the binary “dominant-background” relationship. Things are much more egalitarian with this pattern and so I tend to take a sort of rock-paper-scissors approach: green backgrounds blue, white backgrounds green, and white also, uh, backgrounds blue. I wish I could include lizard and Spock. Maybe with a 5-color pattern?

These socks are pretty huge, which will be nice if I want to wear them over other socks on a very cold day. But they have been asking me to felt them. We’ll see. I have just one more bit of patterning left on each sock, and then I will be ready to begin on the 4”-5” of ribbing for the cuff. I am already planning on making another pair, this time with a sport weight yarn. I will get to expand the patterns, because I will be able to fit more knitting between toes and heels and between heels and cuff.

They look good! But there is a lot of end-weaving-in to do. I think they will remain unfelted (they are not so big that they can afford to shrink much) but I will reinforce the heels.

I have some nice sport-weight yarn, all dyed by yours truly, and I think I will use the same pattern to make legwarmers.