Thursday, February 14, 2008

Sock Woes

I was a little sceptical as I was working on the foot shaping, but tried to withhold judgement until after the turning of the heel. As you can see, the spiralling section of the Coriolis Sock seems to be the cause of puckers.
Perhaps it's better on the foot?
Not so much. 

(Excuse the funky colour). The sock is about half an inch too long (so much for all the laborious gauge measurements and subsequent calculations) and so does not disguise the puckers, but the truth is that the stitches that spiral lie along the diagonal and are too short and so cause the regular vertical (or horizontal, if you prefer) stitches to seersucker in a most unattractive way.

I'm rather unimpressed, quite frankly. What kind of machinations were needed for the lovely photos in the book? I do hope that the other stylings are truer, and I guess I'll find out soon enough, as I might as well try another.

In other news, it's bronchitis, and I have these gorgeous fuchsia pills which with a bit of luck will heal me up so that I can actually breathe enough when I exert myself more than just typing.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

How very odd.
My corioli worked... It must be that the Master Numbers Chart has a failure somewhere. I'm thinking that if you'd made a shorter foot things would have worked.

Such a shame, b/c the finished fellow (when it fits) is quite lovely.

Of course, at this point, I wouldn't blame you a bit for frogging and starting over on a wholly different designer's wholly different pattern.

Charlene said...

I suspect that part of the problem may be that I did, as she suggested somewhere in the text, make the spiralling strip wider: instead of a single k1 between the increase and the decrease, I did k3.

If the angle of the spiral were less extreme, the fact that the band had to span the diagonal (when it's really only long enough to span the vertical) would be less problematic, but my tight tension (my socks are always knitted tightly otherwise they don't wear well) combined with the extra width of the spiralling band and what is basically a flaw in the design (occasional short-rows across the spiralling band would probably mitigate this somewhat) all conspired to produce a sub-standard sock.

And yes, I maintain that the design is fundamentally flawed.

Think about it. You have a band of stitches that is as long as the vertical edge of a rectangle, which now has to span the diagonal, which is inevitably longer. If your tension is loose, and the band is very narrow, this might not be noticeable, but a wider band with firmer tension making the fabric less stretchy will only highlight the problem.

Which it did.

I hope her other designs are not equally flawed, or reliant on a particular quality knitted fabric (i.e. sleazier than is my preference for socks).