I’ve commented before on the fact that I’m pretty taken with stripes. Well, A, one of my very good friends in Cologne, gave me two lovely balls of striping sock yarn and some patterns “for the plane”. I cast on the first toe on the train between Cologne and Frankfurt.
By the time I boarded my second flight in Bangkok the foot was well underway.
Since I’ve also been working on a cardigan, the socks were taken out and about in my bag but not worked on much at home. But now they are finished. This is Strrripes, my toe-up version of Regina Satta’s Jeck design. There are columns of slipped stitches which stand out more when the socks are on feet:
I adore stripes but self-striping sock yarn can be worrisome. Do I make the socks match exactly? Do I simply start the second sock where the first one ends? Do I…?
Look closely and you’ll see that the orange stripes across the feet are aligned. This is perfect for T-bar style, Mary Jane, shoes. Look more closely and you’ll see (if it hasn’t jumped out at you already) that the other stripes stop and start roughly in the same places but the colours don’t match. In my indecision over whether to go for perfectly identical socks or not, I chose the other option and knitted one sock from each end of the ball!
It developed a little in Bangkok Airport before growing up considerably while crossing the Indian ocean and after arriving at its new home in Cologne, Germany. We hit puberty on the A31 heading towards the North Sea. Having been there before, 
Sock Two was born in Cologne and spent its childhood on high-speed ICE trains and in buses and trams. It only got as far as Ludwigshafen, 160 odd miles to the south of Cologne and Kassel, 150 miles to the north east but 250 miles by train! Its development was slow but steady. There were no growing pains and Sock Two turned out to look a lot like Sock One.
