I’m calling these my Pre-RSI socks, because they were the project I was in the middle of when my hands stopped working properly last year. So it’s with particular satisfaction that I can say they are done:

One was done by hand, the other partly done on the Passap. Can you tell the difference?

The first sock was mostly done – only a bit of the ankle and the cuff to do. I thought I would have to finish them over several weeks, hand knitting for half and hour each night (and only if my hands weren’t sore), because they were done with alternating rows of two yarns. Though I’d used a short row heel, I knew I couldn’t easily replicate doing it with two yarns on the machine, and I already knew that gusset increases were difficult to do.

But then I discovered that my machine does do colour switching really easily, so I could at least produce a tube:

That left me with hand knitting the toe (top down), doing the section from the gusset increases to heel to gusset decreases, grafting another section of tube on, then the ribbed cuff. It still took several nights to work through all that – one for the toe, two for the gusset and heel, one each for the cuffs – but it certainly kept the hand knitting down to a manageable level.

I’m now working on adding the length to a garment during my half hour hand knitting sessions, but by the time that’s done I should have another pair of socks ready for handknitting cuffs onto. A pair for Paul next, I think.