Fiber Dreams

• Pattern: My own devising, available here
• Yarn: Crystal Palace Maizy in color 1001, Night Shades, 82% corn fiber, 18% elastic nylon
• Needles: US size 1 double pointed, bamboo
• Gauge: 7.5 stitches/inch
• Elapsed time: September 15 through October 17
• Finished size: Men’s size 11 M shoe

My David is one of those men who always wears what he calls “over the calf” socks. He says he wears those instead of the crew length socks because they stay up better. Since he’s always pulling up his socks anyway, the other kind must be really bad. So, between his allergy to wool—he actually gets a rash—and the fact that he wants knee socks (what I call them), this is his first pair. And you’ll notice that they’re crew height. When I opened the package from Susan at Crystal Palace earlier this year and saw the fabulous samples of their new Maizy yarn, Dave was here in my office. And he loved the yarn. So I told him I’d knit him socks out of it. But they’d be crew length, as there simply isn’t enough yarn in two balls to knit socks that would both fit his long feet and go up to his knees. So there you have it.

Since Dave is slender from stem to stern, and he historically has trouble with this length sock, I went out of my way to fit them to his slender lower limbs. Hopefully they’ll stay up. Only time will tell. When I wrote up the pattern I included both “regular” and “fitted” versions of the cuff, knowing that not everyone is as slender of ankle as my hubby, while some might appreciate having the decreases written out.

Oh, and by the way, this corn yarn is nice and soft, and it knit up like a dream. The only problem I had with it was when I reknit the same length of yarn a lot of times it got a little loose, untwisted a bit, and it had to be corraled to get it to behave, which it did without too much trouble, so it was fine, and looked great once that fiddly bit of knitting was done. I still find it hard to get my brain around the fact that this yarn is mostly corn. We’ll see how it holds up over time, but I have a feeling that Dave’s going to be wearing these socks for quite a while.

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