The Curse of the Self-Striping Yarns
I’m going to let you all in on a not-so-secret - I have large feet. Not freakishly large, but larger than average. Finding shoes for my feet isn’t the problem - I take a US 10, and I’ve found some killer end-of-season deals on shoes because the 10 is the last pair left. No, the problem has to do with yarn (of course, welcome to my knitting-obsessive blog).
The cool thing in the knitting world these days is self-striping sock yarn. Pretty colors! Shiny! However, these sock yarns are made for feet much smaller than mine. Say you have a nice, normal, US 7 sized foot. Go shopping! Sock yarn everywhere, and it will stripe perfectly on your foot!
But when you’re me, and you buy a beautiful skein of Yarn Pirate in a colorway that you fell in love with (Hannah, yum!), then you’re bound to be disappointed. You’ve looked around the blogosphere, and people have beautiful results with this yarn, but you know deep down inside that the perfect striping is too good to be true.
The problem is pooling - the color repeats line up so that you get a big clump of one color on one side of the sock, and a big clump of another color on the other side. This clumpiness is exacerbated by patterns where you cast on a larger-than-normal number of stitches, like the Jaywalker pattern. Then you get results like this:
Boo! Lorna’s Laces is especially bad for me - there’s nothing that I can do to avoid it pooling like a mofo. So imagine my surprise when the Yarn Pirate did not stripe thinly, and yet did not pool:
Well. It’s not ideal, but I’ll take these wide, spiraling stripes over pooling and flashing any day!
I must say, this is by far the best fitting sock that I’ve knit for myself (although I only have two other specimens - Broadripple and Baudelaire) because I did something unheard of in sock-knitting circles: I knit a gauge swatch. Gasp! Really, you never hear people talking about gauge swatches for sock yarn - they just cast on some normal number of stitches (like 64) and knit away, regardless of pattern or yarn. The one issue that I’m having with the fit is the depth of the short-row heel - it’s not deep enough, and the stitches across the top of the foot are stretched out a little bit. I might work some increases before the heel on the second sock to try to alleviate this.
In my last post I said that I’d have these socks done sometime in ‘08. Well I’ve been knitting obsessively on this guy since Thursday, so they just might be finished sooner than that. Watching the superbowl helped my progress - I knit while watching the blue team win!
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I’m a 10 also! (sometimes a 9.5, but mostly a 10) My Lorna’s jungle stripe actually striped well, but it did overlap a little bit….us poor large footed ones!!
i must admit, i didn’t dye that yarn to self stripe at all. let’s just chalk it up to your amazing knitting skills and my dyeing abilities ;) i’m so glad you’re happy with the yarn!!! i have big feet too (12, ahem) and i hear ya on the self striping yarn. i get good results with yarntini thought.
I take a 10 in the summer, but in winter, it takes a size 11 shoe to accomodate my hand-knit socks. I’m not crazy about the pooling, but the Jaywalker or Broadripples pattern pretty well take care of that whole issue. Now, where do you find the cute shoes in jumbo sizes is what I wanna know.
I also have size 10 feet, but I don’t use a lot of self-striping yarn. I favor more wildly variegated and mostly solid sock yarn. I love the stripes you got out of the Yarn Pirate stuff though. It looks fantastic!
Eeeeeeeenteresting–my 10.5s and I will have to investigate this Yarn Pirate that you speak of. I’ll also say that the LL’s Self-Striping colors (the ones from Purl Soho) seem to do ok with the striping (rather than pooling)on the big feets as well, as I’ll be able to demonstrate if I ever finish my self-striping Jaywalkers.)
I’m not sure if you’re up for this but Eunny has a great tutorial for dying your own custom self striping yarn by determining the length you knit each row.
http://www.eunnyjang.com/knit/2005/12/techniques_selfstriping_yarn.html
Your sock looks great!
Also a 10 (big footed girls UNITE!) and had no idea the perils of self-striping yarn and sock knitting. (Sounds like the perfect excuse to keep on postponing sock knitting!)
The Yarn Pirate sock is gorgeous! Love the color, love the stripes.
Also - as long as we’re talking ’bout love - tell us more about your superfly shoes??? ‘Cause I love them too…
I love the socks, the colors are coming out quite nicely. I actually love pooling and all the other effects you get with hand-dyed yarn, it adds so much mystery to the knitting. It’s like a Gaussian Random Process! (Ok, I’ll leave now.) ;)
Ooh! Ooh! Don’t rip out the Jaywalker! I cast on for a pair of toe-up JWs for my size 11 feet and I thought that it was pooling all funky too (looked exactly like yours, actually). But I kept going and thing started striping nicely once I got a little bit further into the foot. I haven’t gotten past the heel yet and it was a different yarn (STR) but you might want to knit a bit more just to see?
It’s not you, it’s the yarn.
the colors on that sock are lovely! I will have to look into this Yarn Pirate bidness.
I’ve always heard that changing needle sizes will alter the pooling issue, but I’ve never tried it myself. I normally go with the needle size to make the fabric that I like, so if I go up in needle size, I figure they will be too loose in the end and I won’t like them.
Those turned out to be quite lovely!
I think size 10s are more common than you might think! I do like the way those sripes are working out too.
Hey that Yarn Pirate sock looks great! Fun color and the stripes are very nice! Now the Jaywalker… that’s LL? I’ve never used LL but I really would expect it to pool.
Maybe it’s just me and my wonky tastes, but I think the way the yarn in the first picture pools looks pretty nice. Then, I enjoy working with yarns that end up pooling since I have a strange sort of compulsion to see just how big a pool of colour I can get.
I do know the burden of large feet, though. Not only do I have feet so large that most women’s shoes won’t fit me and thus I have to look for men’s shoes, I also have to buy wide versions of the men’s shoes. Stupid big feet.
I have the opposite problem.. I’m considering buying some kids shoes because the adult “unisex” sizes are too big for me. :(
And, um, I just bought Yarn Pirate’s second to last skein from her etsy shop. (I was the 555th sale, which is kind of exciting) Looks like I’ll need to get Amy or you to help me perfect the beginning of a toe-up sock.