the stocking to end all stockings is currently blocking. luckily it doesn’t seem to have expanded to the size of a small country in the process as feared, so i must stop buying odd little extra things to make it seem a little less empty come the big day.

the pattern is red bird knits’ winter dreams, possibly a little ambitious for a first fair isle project, but it’s exactly what i’d envisaged; something totally wintery and frosty and crisp in those 2 shades of blue. it’s in aran weight blue faced leicester on 5mm needles. the little tension glitches appear to be (mostly) blocking out pretty well, and once i’d got into the swing of things it was really quite straightforward. this was my first ever top-down sock too, and the magical turning of the heel was well explained.

there were 2 significant errors in the pattern, the most obvious of which (absent flourishes to the left of the main snowflake pattern) i spotted in time. but i missed the other (the horizontal bar across the bottom arm of the small snowflake is in the wrong place) totally at the top of the leg since i was concentrating so hard on everything else at that stage! so decided to repeat the error on the toe, and have them match, rather than correct it. must remember to let rbk know.

i also made a couple of cock ups of my very own. most significantly, i thought i was being clever by adding an extra quarter round of stitches before the heel, to place the large snowflake motif on the sides of the leg rather than front/back - since a stocking is only really seen from the side it made sense to show the whole pattern. it didn’t occur to me to check that this placed the start/end row seam at the back of the leg, and of course it didn’t, it put it slap bang at the front :roll: and of course i didn’t realise this until i’d knitted rather more of the heel than was worth ripping and reknitting. i thought i demonstrated an admirable lack of perfectionism in letting that one go :)

i forgot that slipped stitches should always go purlwise until half way through the heel, but even i can barely spot the twisted stitches when i’m looking for them. i got my k2tog and ssk decreases mixed up on the gusset, so it’s a litte untidy in places there. oh and for balance i should have done the tip of the toe in the paler blue, i think, so top, heel and toe matched.

but all that aside, i love it :D and i loved knitting it (for the most part, the 80% complete ennui still kicked in as per usual). it’s absolutely everything i wanted, and i hope madam pauses long enough in her wrapping ripping frenzy to at least notice it.