Pattern Review: Night Walk Socks

I finished the first item off my Make 9 for 2020 in January! Off to a good start!

The Night Walk socks from Lindsey of Lost and Fawned were one of the patterns I bought as part of Sockvent 2019. When she had originally released them I went back and forth on whether I really wanted to make them, but once they were part of Sockvent I managed to make up my mind in the 24 hour period. And then I had 2 decent sized balls of yarn sitting next to each other that I just loved and knew that they would be perfect for these socks, moving them to the top of the To-Make list.

I’ve talked about these colours before – chouette and plume from The Wool Baron, in my No Frills Pattern Review. Purple is my favourite colour, and just because my No Frills sweater didn’t end up being colour blocked in these 2 colours didn’t mean they shouldn’t end up together somewhere!

While I finished my Solewarming Socks first, the Night Walk Socks were my first cast on of 2020, and therefore the first time I’d done colourwork in a sock. It went as well as you might expect for a first try – in that it didn’t go perfectly. I finished the colourwork charts, tried it on (thank goodness that recommendation is in the pattern!), and it did not go over my heel. So I pulled back to before the colourwork began and switched to a larger needle size. Really this was fortuitous as it turned out I had also made an error in following the pattern, more on that below.

The needle size called for in this pattern is 2.25 mm (US 1), what I consider to be the norm for a fingering weight sock. It is quite common though to increase needle size when doing colourwork, though because of my inexperience with it I didn’t think it would be necessary to do it here. Obviously I was wrong, and switching to 2.75 mm (US 2) needles for the colourwork fixed the problem of it not fitting over my heel. Another remedy for this is to push your work through the middle of your needle so that you knit it inside out, thereby slightly increasing the length of the float, which I did along with the larger needle for my second sock.

These socks also became an inadvertent example of colour dominance when knitting. You can see that the grey/light purple is much more prominent on my right sock. I had only recently heard about this, but didn’t read about it until after I was done these socks, my friend Nicole of Woolfield Studio referred me to this article on how colours can be more dominant when knitting.

I haven’t used charts a lot in the past, though did give it a go for my Portico socks. I think it is a lot easier for colourwork than lace or cables though, and I did solely rely on the chart for these socks. But that was also where I made my mistake the first time around. On separate pages of the pattern are the written instructions, which refer to the chart AND have one additional row, and the chart itself. The chart does not contain the additional row that is in the written instructions, so as I repeated my chart, I left out that row the first time. It made the colourwork look a little bit funny. So just be aware of that if you are making these socks.

Aside from adding another needle size, the other change I made to the pattern was for the heel flap. It was written differently from how I am used to it, giving a number of slipped stitches on the side you are working to, rather than a number of rows. I’m not sure how big of a difference it would make, but it seemed like to get to the number of slipped stitches in the pattern, you would need to do a few more rows then I normally do on a heel flap. So instead of testing it out, I did the number of rows I typically do in socks – 32, which worked out to 16 slipped stitches along the edge of the heel flap.

The toe continues in the pattern across the top of the foot, but I think the sock could also look good if you stopped doing the pattern and just did plain stockinette for the toe.

So to summarize, I recommend:

• Using a larger needle size for the colourwork, so you don’t have to rip back!
• Referring to both the colourwork chart and the written instructions