Pyroclastic Fantastic

I have a sock rotation. There are a select group of people for whom I make socks and I just rotate through them.  Mom, Sister, Hub, Me, wash, rinse, repeat.  It works out pretty well with everyone getting a new pair of socks about once a year or so.  Sometimes there are random pairs thrown in just because I felt like it, or occasionally on request from Hub's uncle. But in general socks get finished in that order.

So, the last socks I had finished were for myself, meaning it was Mom's turn.  I had the yarn and pattern all picked out and ready to go, but for whatever reason hadn't cast on.  One day mid-spring, my phone rang.  My pregnant sister was very sad because she had worn a hole through her favorite socks and could I fix them?  I mention she was pregnant because I think that a hole in a sock might not have been such an emergency in a non-hormonal state.

She really didn't know what to do and she was really sad about it.  Which made me sad, because she's a good sister and a good mother and deserves comfy feet.  So, I dug through the bucket of sock yarn scraps and found  the leftover Artyarns Ultramerino4 and tossed in in my knitting bag.  I knew I was headed home soon and we would see what we could do then.I was, however, not hopeful that the socks could be saved and sis had really thought she would bring them to the hospital with her when she had the baby. 

In the meantime, I thought I might try to eek out a new pair before baby arrival.  So, I grilled her a bit on what exactly was it about those socks that made them her "favorite". The short-row heel? The short-row toe?  (I really hoped not, I hate doing those) The stitch pattern? The yarn texture?  After a lot of "I don't know, they just are", I finally established that a) she really liked the color and b) she thought the cables were beautiful.  I was a bit confused on that second point because they didn't have any cables, and my sister knows that  I don't really like to knit cables and I definitely don't do them on socks.

So there I was with the mission to recreate these socks.  Easy peasy right?  Not quite: That yarn was purchased in late 2007.  That color is long discontinued, plus, since they wore out so quickly,  I had some misgivings about using the yarn again.

The hunt began.

I spent many hours searching the internet and LYSs for something that could be a suitable replacement.  I tough job, I know, but for my sister I'd bear the burden.  ;) I finally settled on Cascade heritage paints in the colorway wild roses (9883).  It's not quite as bright, but I thought it was pretty close.  Plus, the nylon content would make it more durable.

Then I set out to find a pattern.  I wanted to recreate the original socks as much as possible, but I hate knitting things more than once.  I finally decided on Pyroclastic from Knitty.  It had that same cabled look, without the cabling and a neat arch construction that I thought would be fun to try.

It turns out that the stitch pattern for pyroclastic and that for nutkin are identical except that pyroclastic eliminates three plain rows between each repeat.  A little ways into the cuff I realized that the knitting was very familiar and dug out the old pattern.  Sure enough pretty much the same.  It seemed to be a lucky guess on my part. 

In any case, I did mange to finish them up before both her birthday an the baby's slightly early arrival.  Both are doing fine and she was wearing the socks when we video chatted this morning.  She loves them, but the verdict on the arch shaping, which was kind of a pain in the butt, was that she didn't notice enough of a difference.

Here you have, the fantastic pyroclatics:



The yarn was nice to work with, and if these hold up well, it will likely become a go to sock yarn in the future.

So there you have it, the knitting emergency that put me from a  sane-knitter-with-a-reasonable-number-of-projects to a crazy-out-of-control-ADD-knitter.

A sucessful start to the summer knitting if I do say so myself. On to the baby blanket....