Marnie, speak! Good girl.

My mom and I are spending the week with my grandmother, in NJ, tending to all those various and sundry matters that need attending to when someone passes away. I'm sure that by the end of the week, I'll be cursing the various government offices of New Jersey, but for now, it's nice to feel like I'm being helpful in some way.

For entertainment, I've brought along a few stitch dictionaries and enough sock yarn to knit a body stocking.

Back in February, I fancied myself ever so creative for coming up with a cute little Escher inspired colorwork pattern. While I waited for my plane in Portland, I discovered that a nearly identical colorwork patter was already published in my Mon Tricot stitch dictionary. Drat! I've had this book forever so I feel quite sure that I had seen it before but it never registered in my conscious.

Here's the chart that I designed

And here's my swatch from Mon Tricot.

Matchy matchy, huh? There are some subtle differences, but not enough to call it an original stitch pattern, by any stretch of the imagination. It's based on this image.

Well, I may not be the brilliantly inspired artist I imagined myself to be but it surely doesn't mean I can't proceed as I originally planned.

The swatch colors are the leftovers of my Erte Cloche. I don't think I have enough yarn to make a pair of socks, so I just used the yarn for a swatch and will rip it and repurpose it for something else. Whatever I knit will probably be worked up in green and brown, instead.

I guess my Escher inspired chart from this post is a little more unique than I realized. As I was plotting and scheming (there hasn't been any knitting, but there's been a lot of thinking) I realized that the Mon Tricot chart is a stand alone motif. I doesn't repeat. This is what the chart looks like when tiled.

This actually makes me feel a little bit better because I cannot tell you how long it took me to create a motif that properly repeated. Here's my chart repeated the same number of times as the Mon Tricot version above.

Seamless, yay!

Feel free to download my chart if you'd like to use it.

It's rather shameful to admit how many times I ripped this toe out, while I was in New Jersey. I started with a short row toe. The first several tries were vetoed stitch patterns for the toe and sole. I also started to doubt my color choice. The brown and green, separate, are quite pretty, but together, the green starts to look a little dingy to me. I'm warming up to it a little, but I think I would have preferred more of a mint color, which would have contrasted better.

Here's the thing about a short row toe, a stockinette toe, in a single color, can be knit up the top and back down the bottom, joined in the round and look great. You can even work the toe in one color and the body in another and no one will be able to detect your knitting acrobatics, but with colorwork, one side would be offset by half a stitch, once the instep was begun.

Of course, that didn't occur to me right away.

Most other toe up constructions either require some foundation rows that are a bit fiddly for color work, or require circular needles, of which I had none small enough for this purpose. After a few fits and stops, I decided to just do a provisional cast on and graft the toe shut. It produces one small line of solid brown, but I rather like it.

The final toe turned out a touch longer and pointier than I normally like, but I was feeling a bit stubborn and decided I wanted to proceed.

I knit quite a bit of the instep on my flight home.

My next challenge will be deciding how I want the gusset to look. I'm going to try doing it in the same check pattern, but I'll have to play around a bit to see if I like the look.

When the gusset is done and the heel turned, I'll stop working the check pattern and begin working three repeats of the chart, all the way around the sock.

I'm actually a wee bit further on this sock. I've already turned the heel and begun the first couple of rows of the heel flap. I don't like how the heel flap is looking, though, so I'll probably rip it back and reassess.

The gusset worked up just fine. Like the toe, I worked increases right at the edge so I could maintain the checkered pattern without any interruption.

As with Epona, I used Widdershins as my reference for how to construct the sock. If you want to figure out how to reverse a cuff down sock construction, I suggest this pattern as a starting point.

One little tidbit that might appeal to you top-down sock knitters, with a toe-up sock, you do not need to pickup stitches along the heel flap. If that isn't worth the price of admission, I don't know what is.

And finally, check out the frost on our overgrown back lawn.

My hand knits are just itching to go out for a walk.