We’ve already discussed how bobbles were not for me.  Now we’ll take a moment to remind ourselves that pink is not my color.  Pink, purple – no thank you. It’s just not my style.

Why, then, do I love these socks?  I can’t get enough of them.  I spent my free time today knitting instead of reading Twilight (Breaking Dawn comes out Saturday!), instead of putting together a contest entry for a Ravelry group I belong to, instead of playing with the cats (sorry, guys).  These socks are magical.  “Just a few more rows”, I keep telling myself, “just until the next repeat passes off the edge”.  And then I keep going.  The pattern author indicated in her blog entry that she intended this trick on the foot as an antidote to second sock syndrome.  I think she has succeeded. 

These socks are a pleasure to knit.  The yarn is wonderful, Kells Sport Merino from Three Irish Girls. It’s soft and squishy and not too thin, doesn’t hurt after rubbing along my finger for hours on end, and feels nice in my hands.  The colorway – which I would never have chosen on my own – is beautiful, so subtle and yet full of colors – pink, lavender, rose, violet, every shade in between. The color repeats are marvelously short, I do not need to spend a minute worrying about pooling (which I dislike, so this is wonderful).

This photo does not do the yarn justice. In reality, the heel flap might actually be my favorite single thing about these socks. (I love the socks as a whole, but if I had to choose one individual aspect, it would be this heel flap.)

I worked the socks in the round through the heel flap and turn, and picking up stitches along the gusset, at which point I had to split because my circular needle (barely long enough for two-at-once magic loop socks) just could not hold that many stitches and still function.

The right sock is currently on hold (bearing stitch markers reminiscent of Edward’s topaz eyes courtesy of my Twilight stitch marker club)

(You can see here how my bobbles are ever so slightly off center; it seems the stitch preceeding the bobble tends more toward looseness than the one directly after it. I suspect blocking may help slightly but not entirely.)

while I work on the left sock (using the “dazzle” stitch markers from the same club – absolutely gorgeous – and a single stitch marker I received as a blog contest prize a couple of years ago, which is perfect for keeping track of my rows)

(see the heel flap? Gorgeous, isn’t it.)

Beautiful, no?

Do you begin to see how the pattern slides off the side of the foot?  (Ignore my tendon-riffic foot, I was flexing it to show off the foot a bit better. I have discovered it’s fairly challenging to take photos of ones’ own feet.)

I do believe part of the fun is watching the stitch markers sparkle in the light (nifty row-counting-marker in the foreground).