At Last!
I'm long-overdue to make the detailed post about this project. I actually started it very long ago - it was in-progress when I entered K&Q A&S Champs. I ended up putting it aside as I was overtaken by other things, like Life and Things That Go Wrong In It.
Way back in 2006, I made a study of several Middle Eastern socks in The Textile Museum. It was my first museum trip and really partly a practice/preparation for going to the V&A in London later that year. I later made a reproduction pair of one of the socks, resized to fit me, and using purple commercially-dyed yarn so as to make them easily distinguishable from an intended pair (yet to come) that will use blue yarn hand-dyed with indigo. (The purple version is featured rather prominently in my avatar photo.)
The sock of this group which is most often seen and imitated is the Animal Sock. It's an adorable sock with a design of palm trees and animals. (I think they're deer or maybe antelope, but I've heard others who think of different animals.) I have to say, for all the people who've seen different photos or versions of these socks - the actual sock is little. It has to be a child's sock, which only makes it more precious, in my opinion. In my pursuit of Trying Something Cool, I set out to replicate this little sock as closely as I could.
I hand-dyed the yarn with indigo. Now, I do my indigo dyeing the cheater way, using crystallized indigo which works instantly. I've tried to get a proper fermentation vat going, with no luck. Since I don't have a yard conducive to long-term smelly and/or messy projects, I've made my peace with being a big cheater-cheater pumpkin eater. I used the same yarn I had used for the first pair of socks - a 4-ply unmercerized cotton sold for weaving. At the time, I had searched what seemed like the entire internet for an appropriate yarn for this, and got the best I could. Now, I think I might be able to get the same weight in a 2- or 3-ply yarn, which would be closer to the museum piece.
I graphed the pattern for the sock directly from photos I took of the extant sock in the museum, stitch for stitch. I worked so closely from those photos that I noticed something I had never spotted before (and to my knowledge, neither has anyone else) - the pattern jogs were reversed relative to mine. Socks like this are knitted in the round - for the non-knitters, this means that the stitches build on each other in a spiral like a Slinky. When you work a colored pattern, there's a shift where you change from one row to the next - as if you took a marker and drew a line vertically on your Slinky, and then tried to match up the ends of a single round of wire. I, like every other modern knitter I know, knit from right to left, so my jogs line up with the "high side" on the right. In the extant sock, the "high side" of the jogs were on the left. I haven't quite figured out what I think of this - experiments are needed. It may be possible that they were actually working in what we would call reverse stockinette, which is basically knitting it from the wrong side. I'm not convinced that would give this result, but it might. As I said, experiments are required.*
Anyway, I finally have it completed and have a decent photo of it. Unfortunately, I can't post a photo of the museum piece for comparison; it would violate the terms under which they allowed me to take the pictures.
For reference, the foot measures 6 inches from end of heel to tip of toe; the leg measures right at 7 inches from top to the tip of the heel. I had recorded the extant piece at 5 inches in the foot and 7 inches in the leg. I believe the difference between my foot length and theirs is a result of inaccurate measurement of the museum piece. It was flattened at some point in time, preserving a little bit of folding, and I could not straighten it to enable as accurate a measurement as I could take of my own piece. Since the leg length is pretty spot-on, I think this is a reasonable belief.
This piece was knitted on #00 needles (1.75 mm diameter) - mine happen to be aluminum, but I don't believe the needle material has any effect on the product. The gauge is right at 10 st/in horizontally and 12 rows/in vertically; I had recorded the extant piece's gauge at 10 st/in horizonally and 9 rows/in vertically. Again, given how closely the leg lengths match, I suspect faulty counting/measuring under pressure in the museum.
* Please note - to my knowledge, this observation has only been reported by me, in the documentation written for this project. In other words, I do not believe it has been published anywhere else at this time. I really hope I don't end up learning a hard lesson about human nature from putting this up here.
Way back in 2006, I made a study of several Middle Eastern socks in The Textile Museum. It was my first museum trip and really partly a practice/preparation for going to the V&A in London later that year. I later made a reproduction pair of one of the socks, resized to fit me, and using purple commercially-dyed yarn so as to make them easily distinguishable from an intended pair (yet to come) that will use blue yarn hand-dyed with indigo. (The purple version is featured rather prominently in my avatar photo.)
The sock of this group which is most often seen and imitated is the Animal Sock. It's an adorable sock with a design of palm trees and animals. (I think they're deer or maybe antelope, but I've heard others who think of different animals.) I have to say, for all the people who've seen different photos or versions of these socks - the actual sock is little. It has to be a child's sock, which only makes it more precious, in my opinion. In my pursuit of Trying Something Cool, I set out to replicate this little sock as closely as I could.
I hand-dyed the yarn with indigo. Now, I do my indigo dyeing the cheater way, using crystallized indigo which works instantly. I've tried to get a proper fermentation vat going, with no luck. Since I don't have a yard conducive to long-term smelly and/or messy projects, I've made my peace with being a big cheater-cheater pumpkin eater. I used the same yarn I had used for the first pair of socks - a 4-ply unmercerized cotton sold for weaving. At the time, I had searched what seemed like the entire internet for an appropriate yarn for this, and got the best I could. Now, I think I might be able to get the same weight in a 2- or 3-ply yarn, which would be closer to the museum piece.
I graphed the pattern for the sock directly from photos I took of the extant sock in the museum, stitch for stitch. I worked so closely from those photos that I noticed something I had never spotted before (and to my knowledge, neither has anyone else) - the pattern jogs were reversed relative to mine. Socks like this are knitted in the round - for the non-knitters, this means that the stitches build on each other in a spiral like a Slinky. When you work a colored pattern, there's a shift where you change from one row to the next - as if you took a marker and drew a line vertically on your Slinky, and then tried to match up the ends of a single round of wire. I, like every other modern knitter I know, knit from right to left, so my jogs line up with the "high side" on the right. In the extant sock, the "high side" of the jogs were on the left. I haven't quite figured out what I think of this - experiments are needed. It may be possible that they were actually working in what we would call reverse stockinette, which is basically knitting it from the wrong side. I'm not convinced that would give this result, but it might. As I said, experiments are required.*
Anyway, I finally have it completed and have a decent photo of it. Unfortunately, I can't post a photo of the museum piece for comparison; it would violate the terms under which they allowed me to take the pictures.
For reference, the foot measures 6 inches from end of heel to tip of toe; the leg measures right at 7 inches from top to the tip of the heel. I had recorded the extant piece at 5 inches in the foot and 7 inches in the leg. I believe the difference between my foot length and theirs is a result of inaccurate measurement of the museum piece. It was flattened at some point in time, preserving a little bit of folding, and I could not straighten it to enable as accurate a measurement as I could take of my own piece. Since the leg length is pretty spot-on, I think this is a reasonable belief.
This piece was knitted on #00 needles (1.75 mm diameter) - mine happen to be aluminum, but I don't believe the needle material has any effect on the product. The gauge is right at 10 st/in horizontally and 12 rows/in vertically; I had recorded the extant piece's gauge at 10 st/in horizonally and 9 rows/in vertically. Again, given how closely the leg lengths match, I suspect faulty counting/measuring under pressure in the museum.
* Please note - to my knowledge, this observation has only been reported by me, in the documentation written for this project. In other words, I do not believe it has been published anywhere else at this time. I really hope I don't end up learning a hard lesson about human nature from putting this up here.