My dad celebrated his birthday on Sunday and I made him a new pair of socks for the occasion.
My dad splits his time between Phoenix and Las Vegas, so I wanted to make socks that were not 100% wool. Do you guys have any idea how hard it is to find non-wool sock yarn in dad-friendly colors?! All of the cotton blends I encountered had a bunch of candy-colored brights, crazy colorways, and then black. Grad school in the humanities is enough eye strain for me, thank you very much, so black was out of the question. I was thrilled to find this soft gray Regia Cotton online at Royal Yarns. It is 41% wool, 34% cotton, and 25% polymid (I assume the latter is for durability and elasticity).
I have to admit, while knitting, this stuff felt very stringy! I got pretty worried that these would be the scratchiest socks ever. They bloomed beautifully in the wash though so I really had nothing to worry about.
I used my all-time favorite men’s sock pattern for these: Ann Budd’s “A Pair of Socks” pattern that was a freebie on Interweave Knits website in 2005 but sadly is discontinued. If you didn’t snag this pattern while it was posted online, you can probably improvise pretty easily from any other men’s sock pattern. The trick is the ribbing, which is an alternating rib (*K3, p1, k1, p1. Repeat from *). I added some calf shaping to these by casting on with size 3 (3.25mm) needles, working the first 2″ of cuff with size 2 (2.75mm) needles, and the rest on size 1 (2.25mm). When I got to about the 4″ mark on the cuffs, I decreased six stitches to narrow the ankles, hiding the decreases in almost every other k3. You can hardly notice they are there!
These worked up surprisingly quickly for enormous gray socks, and I was happy to see that you can easily squeeze a size 11 men’s sock with 8.5″ cuff out of a single ball of the Regia Cotton (200m per ball). I had yarn to spare.
I was so happy to be able to make my dad a gift like this, but now that they are done, I’m not too sad to be back to my more process-oriented knits either. Expect some pictures soon of my Tyrolean Stockings for the International Sock Swap.
Dad’s Socks Project Notes on Ravelry
