I finished up The Fellowish socks, the fourth out of the LOTR series from The Unique Sheep, that I'm slowly chipping away at.
PROJECT SPECS:
Pattern: The Fellowship (see Ravelry link above) by Lobug. The pattern is written toe-up and consists of travelling stitches up the foot and the front of the leg. The back of the leg is just plain knit. They feature a great little picot bind off that I'm now quite enamored of. I would rate this maybe intermediate. The charts are a little confusing - the symbols the designer used are the reverse of what most standardized cable charting looks like, so you sort of have to know what you want to achieve in order to get it to work correctly.
Yarn: The Unique Sheep's Sushi Socks (Merino and Bamboo) fingering weight. The kit came with a gradiance colorway, but I really wanted to do these in a solid, so I found the same yarn base, colorway: Blue Boy, in the stash, and knit it up in that.
Needles: Size 2 US DPNs.
Mods: I used Miriam Felton's uber-awesome toe-up sock cast-on, which is now my 100% preferred method. It yields (IMHO) a MUCH nicer result than many of the other ones out there and is very easy to do. I also did the back of the leg in stockinette; the pattern was written for reverse stockinette. I liked that better to keep the continuity with the sole of the foot.
I'm really glad I changed this up and used a different colorway of yarn. I like the intricate look of the cables in this almost-solid colorway, and I think I'll get a lot of wear out of these under jeans and/or khakis (Not that I'm opposed to wildly colored socks. I just prefer these with all the cabling in a plainer colorway.) I was a little unsure how that picot edge would work. You know sometimes how the bind-off for toe-up socks is too snug? Not these - nice and stretchy AND a pretty cute little addition to the ribbing at the top.
All for now......