On a whim, a couple of fellow knitters and I decided to do a yarn swap over christmas. That got us to thinking what we would do with our new yarns. We decided to do 3 KALs throughout the year with a limit of 3 months each. Each of us would get a turn at choosing the pattern. Jules was up first and she decided on this gorgeous sock pattern. As you know, I've been on a bit of a sock bender so these knitted up pretty quickly for me. But it has taught me (finally) a valuable lesson on tension.
I'm a tight knitter by nature. But the fabric in my socks, especially using travelling stitches and twisted rib, was very firm with little stretch. It makes for a challenging time putting the sock on. Don't get me wrong, once these babies are on, they are lovely and snug.
I also discovered an interesting Wollmeise fact. I was getting A LOT of overtwist in Wollmeise. To the point where it sometimes impeded my work. Well, I had a lightbulb moment and realised that it was the fact that I was holding the yarn so tightly over my tension finger. I realised by holding it so tightly, it essentially took all the twist out of the yarn going into the work and pushing it towards the ball. A bit like if you were to run your fingers down an old fashioned phone cord, you straighten it out, but you gather all the twists on the other side of your fingers. When I loosened my grip, there went the overtwist. And it made knitting all those twisted stitches so much easier! Lesson learnt.
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