I spent probably a bit more than just ‘break time’ today working on the Chocolate Sock pattern. Writing out the stitch pattern and adding it to my toe-up sock pattern was the easy and fast bit. After I’d done that I went to Knitty.com to see how much info their patterns contain, and how they are set out.

Knitty is on the top of my list of magazines to submit to, not just because it’s my favourite, online or in print, but because I think the method I use to make the chocolate squares might just be a bit too… unorthodox… for some other periodicals. I have huge doubts, as an unestablished ‘hobby’ designer, that I’d ever get a pattern into Interweave or Vogue. Yet while Creative Knitting appears to love creative looking patterns, I reckon they’d prefer the methods were straight forward. (Sure, we welcome wierd assymetrical legwarmers, just make sure you use normal knit and purl, increase and decrease stitches to make ’em.) Which would probably also be true of any ‘simple’ knitting magazine.

Knitty seems open to interesting methods, demonstrated by all the different ways of casting on a toe that are included in tutorials on the site. If they don’t want the Chocolate Socks, I’ll try Magknits. If Magknits don’t want it, I’ll try the next on my list. The usual routine. One thing I’ve been wondering about and not finding answers for – does the knitting magazine world have the same ‘no simultaneous submissions’ rule that the fiction market has?

Anyway, once I’d gathered all the info I thought I needed, I compared my pattern to a Knitty one and their guidelines and realised I needed to provide a whole lot more info. So I proceeded to Knittify my pattern as far as I could within the time I had.

It doesn’t help that I want to provide five different sizings. I have the toe-up pattern worked out for me (a small lady’s) and Paul (medium male), so I figured I may as well just do the math to work out a few sizes in between. I’m 99% confident those between sizes will work … except where the heel ends and the leg starts. The only way to be sure is to knit a tube in each size (which I’ll have to do in order to provide circumference measurements anyway) then work a heel and a bit of leg.

I’ve got quite a bit of sample knitting to do.

But I’ll also have to do a photo shoot. And that should be fun. There’s got to be some way I can get actual chocolate in the picture.