New sock - a bow to Latvian design

My newest sock of the month:


Latvian Wedding Socks.

It is loaded with Latvian symbols and there are both single and double braids - much easier to do than they look - I had avoided tackling them and was delighted when they turned out to be easy!

This isn't a traditional Latvian sock - but is more loosely based on the wonderful Latvian mittens that I talked about a day or so ago.

The yarn is a a self-patterning one (Meilenweit Fantasy) with wider stripes of colour and a few that are what I call ticking stripes - an inch of dark and an inch of white that turn out looking like little columns (if you are lucky) or random splots of colour (if you aren't).

Where are they you might ask - those blobby splotchy lines of alternating colour. Well......

They are in the garbage can - I stopped short about 4 inches when each one came along and mercilessly chopped it off and dumped it - with a white background they just wouldn't have worked. Luckily both the white for the background and the self-striping come in 100g balls so there is lots of yarn to do the trick. Manipulating the yarn like this makes for a few extra dangles to be darned in - but I happily darned them in to get the effect I was after.

I didn't do anything else to engineer the stripes - they just happened to change nicely in the middle of the big motif. Happy coincidence, but I dont' think I would have minded if they didn't.