Knitting Socks To Match

Day 143: Today, I thought we might step sideways into another area of fiberarts: knitting. Variegated/ombre yarns are an excellent choice for socks, but people often have trouble getting both socks to turn out the same. There are several reasons for this, the first being that commercial space-dyed yarns are put up by yardage, not repeats. Let's assume a colour sequence of red/white/green for ease of explanation. If the sequence was one yard of each colour, life would be easy. A 333-yard skein would contain 111 repeats, starting with red and ending with green. But that isn't the way the real world works. The colour sequence might be two yards of red, one of white, and one of green, i.e., a four-yard repeat. Therefore, our 333-yard skein would contain 83.25 repeats, which is obviously not a convenient multiple. The next skein wound by the factory would pick up where that one left off, and thus, the chance of our purchasing two skeins which each started with two yards of red would be fairly small. And then it gets even more complicated, because many space-dyed yarns contain more than one sequence, e.g., the full repeat might be two yards of red, once of white, one of green, one of red, two of white, one of green, one of red, one of white, two of green which, although the colours are equally represented over 12 yards, the repeat of the full sequence occurs over 12 yards as well. Consequently, the first thing you must do to create matching socks is identify the colour repeat and start each sock in the same place.

Now we come to another factor: tension. None of us, no matter how good we are, knits at the same tension every time we pick up the needles. That means we may get 40 stitches out of one yard of red from our example one day, and 42 the next. These small differences can add up! That means at some point, we're going to have to make allowances, and here's how to go about it.

As I said in the first paragraph, the first thing you want to do is identify the repeat and start each sock in the same place. Yes, you will be working two socks at once, although as a general rule, you can probably knit a whole cuff/leg before you need to adjust. In the case of the socks in the photo, I had trouble telling the blues apart until I came to the lightest one at the end of 55 rounds. Aha! That would be where I needed to have the socks match up. I knit the second sock to that point, found that I still had a yard or so of the next-darkest shade left, so I cut the yarn at that point and, using a Russian join, connected the darker section to the lighter one so that my next stitches would be in the lighter colour. Now the heels will match (or, as they say, "close enough for gov'mint work") and I won't need to make another adjustment until I begin the foot (and probably not even then). If I'm a stitch or two off when I reach the toe, I'm not going to obsess about it.