Early last year I knit these Ribble Socks using the stitch pattern from Socks Socks Socks:

When I first washed them by hand I foolishly tossed them into the washing machine for a quick spin with some other handwashing and discovered that the dye wasn’t particularly well fixed when I took out a favourite hand sewn white shirt and discovered what looked like wine stains all over it.

They’re made from Koigu, which isn’t superwash and, as I’ve mentioned before, I just don’t wear them because of that. A while back I put them into my pile of things to be fixed and altered, with the idea that I could turn them into mittens. After all, the size was right and the shaping of socks wasn’t that different from mittens.

On Friday night I made a start. The first thing I did was cut the legs of the socks off. Then I rediscovered how hard it is to unpick ribbing from the bottom up. Urgh. Once I had all the stitches on the needles, I did a sewn cast off, adding a bead every second stitch.

I’m rather chuffed at how they turned out.

Next I attacked the foot of each sock. I went through similar pains cutting off the toe, but by then I’d worked out that if getting the bottom edge of ribbing to unpick was so hard it was obviously not going to unravel. I did have to do a sewn cast off on what had been the sole of the foot, as it was stocking stitch.

Then I turned the socks around and frogged back to a little way down the instep increases. Now, the only difference between socks and mittens at this point is that the increases on socks go on either side of the sock, while on mittens both increases fall on one side, forming a ‘V’. This meant a bit of creative unravelling and reknitting. I dropped the stitches from one side of the palm to where the middle of the ‘V’ would be, then reknit them with the increases moved to their new position.

Once that was done it was just a matter of doing the usual fingerless mitten shaping – separating the thumb stitches, adding extra stitches across the thumb gap, and finishing both the hand and thumb off with some 1×1 ribbing.

Converting the socks to mittens and wristwarmers wasn’t quick – probably took five or six hours overall – but it was a heck of a lot faster than knitting them from scratch. Especially when you take into account the ribble stitch pattern.

At first when I was struggling with unpicking ribbing I asked myself if it was worth the trouble, and even considered throwing the socks in the bin. But I’m so glad I kept going. I love the mittens, and that beaded edge on the wristwarmers makes the girly girl in me go ‘squeee!’.