I couldn’t wait to try knitting socks again. Rather than chase thinner sock needles, I found thicker yarn and stuck with my 3.25mm needles.

I found this Lincraft Splendour yarn (50% wool/50% acrylic, 50g ball approx. 135m) which suggested 5.5mm needles so it seemed like a good option and I was hoping for an interesting pattern.

I found a different sock pattern to compare it to the Novita pattern I used on my first pair of socks. For these socks I used this sock pattern from Suuri Käsityö which again is in Finnish (sorry to the non-Finnish speakers out there!). The pattern was similar to the Novita pattern but I found this one easier to follow and a few of the techniques were walked-through differently and in a less fiddly way. I only became lost at the final round but I tackled the finishing up in a way I’ve used with other knitted items and it didn’t cause a problem.

Overall the knit was much better than my first sock attempt. The stitches sit together better and there is no obvious laddering or holes. The sock knitting lesson from this is that for my style I need to make sure that my needles are quite a bit smaller than what the yarn recommends (not a very technically specific lesson but hopefully after a few more socks I’ll be able to be more specific).

I really liked the look of the first sock (the top sock in the photo above) with the variegated changes from one colour to the next. I tried to start the second sock from a similar red section of yarn and breathed some sighs of relief as the colour changes in the ankle and heel almost matched the first sock, but the foot section disappointed me. Very little variegation and there was a very sudden colour change at the toe from red to light blue! Hmf.

They still function well as socks and I think the differences are less obvious when they are worn, but I guess the lesson is that random coloured yarn can be hard to match effects in paired items such as socks and mittens.