Last night there was nothing on tv that caught our eye, so I decided to use the free time to concentrate on the Ripple Weave Socks. There was a mistake back… somewhere… so I ripped back to the start of the pattern and spent and hour and a half reknitting, taking special care to follow the chart exactly.

And the mistake was still there.

By then my back and hands were aching. Though the Jitterbug looked great with the pattern, the combination was really hard on my hands. It felt like knitting rope.

So I pushed the cat off my lap and headed upstairs to google the pattern. What did I find? Only one blogger who’d completed the socks, who had found the mistake and offered a fix. Bloggers with incomplete socks cursing Vogue for not putting the fix up on their site. I had checked the Vogue Knitting website before choosing this pattern, but I hadn’t googled the pattern. I must be more cynical in the future.

There was no way I was frogging and reknitting again. And with the ache in my hands I couldn’t bear the thought of knitting a whole pair of socks. The pattern just wasn’t doing it for me. So I frogged:

Which left me with the dilemma of what VK pattern to do for the Sock Challenge instead. The trouble is, Vogue haven’t exactly been plentiful in the publishing of sock patterns. As far as I can tell from my small collection of issues, they’ve only done one small sock feature in one issue, and a few odd colourwork patterns here and there.

Having learned my lesson, I googled two of the other patterns that took my fancy, Nancy Bush’s Traveller’s Socks and Cat Bhordi’s Flow Motion Socks. The latter had caught my eye immediately when I first saw this issue of VK. I was intrigued by the shaping, but put off by the lace, which I didn’t particularly like the look of. Now I wondered if I could keep the shaping but change the lace to plain stocking stitch. Or maybe just, as the yarn harlot says, ‘suck it up’ and do the lace.

So I cast on and started knitting, tried them on and checked gauge, frogged and restarted two needle sizes smaller, and it was bliss.

The pattern specifies two sock yarns knitted together. That pretty much equals 8ply, so I decided to try the Bendigo Harmony. Oooh, I like this yarn! It has none of the hardness of 100% cotton, but the cotton in it gives it an appealing ‘crunchiness’, and the wool and lycra provide spring and stretch. My hands are thanking me for it already.

And best of all, 8ply socks are fast to knit.