As promised, here’s a shot of the beau’s socks:

And the front of the Zhivago Top. Or is it the back? Doesn’t matter, they’re both the same:

And Snicket, with additional progress made in a waiting room today:

I love Snicket. The lattice design is dead easy, and after one pattern repeat I had it memorised. I reckon, though, that if you couldn’t handle cabling without a cable needle you might just go a little insane.

What I love about it is when the ‘strands’ of the lattice come together they twist around each other three times, and this is easily and elegantly done without a cable needle just by knitting into the back of the second stitch, then turning the needle to the front to hook purlwise through the first stitch, then sliding the two stitches off the lefthand needle, slipping the first stitch back and knitting it.

And I love watching the ‘strands’ of knit stitches weave back and forth, twisting with their neighbours.

What I hate, however, is that the pattern isn’t symmetrical.

(Okay, I’m aware that the following probably won’t be interesting to anyone except those knitters contemplating or making Snicket, so feel free to skip to the ***.)

As I’ve said before, probably too many times, I have narrow feet. I have to adjust patterns. After the disaster that my Jaywalkers were, when I knit Pomatomus I decided to knit as close to the instructions as I could. While I love my Pomatomus, they are a little big for my feet. If I knit them again, I’ll do them on smaller needles.

For Snicket I decided to add the cable stitch pattern to my heel-flap toe-up pattern. For me, the biggest advantage of toe-up is I can work out if the foot of the sock is small enough sooner. With a top-down sock I don’t get any warning until after the instep decreases are done. I could decrease a few extra times, but then the heel is usually a bit loose. Everything just gets out of proportion.

So anyway, I knit the toe for Snicket, worked out that 60 stitches was going to make a loose sock, frogged and reduced it to 56.

The instructions say the lattice is a repeat of six stitches. I slipped one stitch from the needles on the sole side onto either end of the top side one, so I had 30 stitches to work with, then started following the written instructions. I began to have gripes straight away.

I reckon a pattern ought to state the obvious. It’s reassuring. When a pattern says, for example, “*k1, p3* to the end” and you find that there’s an odd 3 stitches rather than 4 at the end you wonder if you’ve done something wrong. This pattern leaves you wondering about those last few stitches. Especially when the lattice strands come into play. I sat there wondering whether to knit or purl the last stitch a few times, and eventually just had to make an arbitary decision and see how it looked. A good pattern shouldn’t make you do that.

The next gripe is that the pattern has you move the last stitch from the previous needle onto the next for a bit of cabling… but never actually tells you to move it back again! Or to put the stitch you swapped it with on the last needle.

That wandering stitch bugs me on another level. I can see that it will be necessary when knitting the lattice all the way around the sock, but I don’t think it’s needed for working on top of the foot. Yet there are no separate instructions for the top of the foot that omit this annoying little vagrant stitch.

Which brings me to the lack of symmetry. The reason for it appears to be that using a multiple of six stitches just doesn’t make for a neat arrangment of the lattice. The chart shows a nice symmetrical pattern… but the chart shows three stitches plus six plus four. But that’s not a multiple of six!

What this means is that the leftmost lattice ‘strand’ moves to the edge and forms a nice little twisting column (which I love to bits), but the rightmost one disappears and reappears into the side, right where that vagrant needle-swapping cable stitch lies.

Reading and rereading the pattern, I can see that what I have is the result that I’d get if I’d knit top down – following what was set up for knitting the lattice around the sock down the top of the foot. Maybe there’s a good reason for it not being symmetrical. I’m reserving my judgement until I get there.

***And really, tha lack of symmetry isn’t that obvious. I’m sure nobody will ever notice. It surprises and embarrasses me that it bugs me as much as it does. It seems there’s an anal little fusspot inside me when it comes to knitting. (Which is suprising mainly because there certainly isn’t when it comes to housework.)

I’m afraid this might mean that if my suspicions are confirmed, and knitting the lattice around the whole sock doesn’t justify the lack of symmetry, I’ll frog them and start again.

I tell myself it’s not because I’m an anal fusspot, but (this probably sounds even sillier) this yarn is too nice not to knit perfect socks with it.