The Big and the Little

In the past week or so, I finished two pairs of socks I started earlier this summer.

One pair is for my friend Barb, who is 5' tall and can fit both feet on a single piece of paper.


The other is for my brother Carl, who is 6'3" and can fit one foot on a piece of paper.



Provided the paper is turned diagonally.

Barb's feet are 7" in circumference at the ball. Carl's are 11".

For Barb's socks, I used the Devon pattern (Ravelry link) from Cookie A's Sock Innovations. The pattern calls for a thicker fingering weight -- Mountain Colors Bearfoot, which I love, and is probably more accurately a sport weight yarn. The problem with using the specified yarn was that I would have had to adjust the pattern to lower the stitch count to fit her. So I used Cascade Heritage, instead, which is a fairly fine fingering weight yarn. (Lots of yardage, and a great price!) They are very soft after washing, and show stitch definition really well. I was able to knit the pattern as written using the thinner yarn and smaller needles, without adjusting stitch counts.

They look good on her.



She stopped by this weekend to pick them up and agreed to model them.




Good thing for her that she has small feet. I would have had a hard time parting with them if they fit me!

Carl came for a visit in July and while he was here he went to the yarn shop with me when I offered to knit him socks. I envisioned endless 90-stitch rounds in tan or grey, knit over many boring months.

He took one look at a Kaffe Fasset colorways from Regia on a mannequin leg, fondled it and said he liked that one.

"Really?" I asked, trying to keep desperate hopefulness out of my voice. Could it be true that a man would really want this colorway? While I had always considered it fairly manly, I couldn't see my husband finding it acceptable, if he ever allowed me to knit him socks, which he doesn't.

Besides which, I had socks in the same colorway in my drawer at home, as you can see here.



"You don't mind the flash of turquoise?" I asked, still not believing he liked it, and trying hard to feign apathy. Mustn't let him know I'm excited. "No," he said. "I like the turquoise."

Hallelujah. Even if the socks would take forever to knit, they wouldn't be boring!

Then I got to thinking. My socks were made from 4-ply (fingering weight). I remember knitting 9 sts/in, 64 sts to the round. This yarn is 6-ply (DK weight). Guess how many sts/round? 64! (for the leg, but a bit bigger for the foot) They did not, in fact, take me months and months of begrudging labor to make. Just a few days per sock, spread out over six weeks, of course, because I rarely knit two identical socks in a row.

A brother-sister sock photo


He lives in Michigan, and no one else I know has feet big enough to model them, so I put his on over my other sock, in an attempt to make it fit better.



Look, if I adjust my foot position, the stripes match perfectly because we have the same stitch count per round.

The last time we had brother-sister matching garments was back in 1968.