My good friend Lorna made me a lovely scarf for my birthday, so I thought I probably ought to reciprocate – if not in kind, then in something approaching it. Given that there’s only a month and a half between our birthdays, it needed to be something I could be sure to finish, but that had features which a fellow knitter would appreciate.

After a surf through my favourites (which generally includes anything I’ve seen which I fancy having a go at) I came across these Jeans Socken, which seemed ideal.

pattern author's picture from Ravelry.com

Why?

• Lorna’s family is from Ireland (both sides of the fence) so excessive cables in a celtic-stylee seem just right
• I had some offensively green hand dyed sock yarn in the stash, which was given to me by my next-oldest friend (I think)
• Lorna’s partner is German, so the fact that the pattern is (translated from) German seems entirely appropriate
• I was confident I could knock these off in time. Sort-of.
• I like them, so would find them charming to knit. Hopefully.

I set to fairly quickly and indeed, they made quite good progress. I was working on them on the train one day, and bumped into my boss. She admired them, but said (I think possibly before she could stop herself) “They’re amazing. Will they fit an adult woman?”

There’s quite a lot of cabling as you can see, and ribbing, which pulls the socks in quite a lot. So on the needles they looked quite small.

She had a point. The fit of these socks was in serious doubt. The pattern was a bit vague on sizing. It might be better in the original, but there wasn’t a gauge statement, and the three sizes given were in number of stitches per round. I had plumped for the middle one, because… well… why not? It sounded about right.

You can kind of see here how there’s a lot of pulling in which means that unless there is stretching you can get about 3 fingers into the leg of the sock. This picture was taken while dealing with another mishap where I discovered that slender bamboo needles need to be packed fairly carefully or they might break. I carried on working with the needles past the end of one sock and into the next, where the logistics of casting on with a split needle, meaning that the stitches could only travel one way on the needle without being shredded, gave me the mother of all brain-aches, before finally giving in and conceding that it was probably worth investing in a new small circular needle. Still, I was on a long journey and was knitting up against a deadline. What’s a girl to do?

I finished one sock and tried it on – it was snug, but not in a way that stops circulation, so as long as Lorna’s feet are roughly the same as mine we’ll be good.

It was shortly after this that I discovered that Lorna’s feet are slightly larger than mine.

With all the conviction of a regular sailor of Denial I ploughed on anyway. Hopefully this would not be an issue.

There was some fudging of the cables at the point end of the toes as I ended up with a different number of stitches to the pattern’s expectations – I was able to finish the cables neatly, though, and grafted the end live stitches in stead of gathering them.

I’m very much liking these and am confident that the lightness of touch in the hand dyeing variegation means that I haven’t violated the patterned yarn and pattern not looking good together rule (which Lorna and I both generally subscribe to).

In the end, I took a decision to trust Lorna’s judgement (nearly always a good idea, I find!) and wing them over to her with a note that if they didn’t fit I would happily take these back (oh please, let them not fit!) and make her another pair. Possibly of a different design because although these weren’t hard or hard work particularly, there aren’t *that* many patterns I’m happy to do over and over.

Anyway, it turns out Lorna likes her socks snug and most socks are too baggy for comfort. So – hurrah! the perfect gift. I knew I’d stumble on it eventually.

I’m off now to look for another sock pattern which uses a lot of ribbing and cables… Any suggestion?