2 socks in 2 years

You may have seen these socks over in the side bar, or in my ravatar on Ravelry.  That is because it took me 2 years to finish them, so I want as many people as possible to see them.

They are the pattern in the Sock Summit logo, a pattern called Orion (ravelry link).  I started them the summer of 2009 before going to Sock Summit.

The yarn is some Socks that Rock (Sherbet) that I happened to have bought at Lettuce Knit in Toronto the year before (for WAY too much because the exchange rate was horrible so I spent about $29 US because it was souvenir yarn.)  So it was Tina's yarn bought at Stephanie's yarn store.  And the black yarn is DIC Starry (I think the color is Black Parade).  Starry yarn, how could I not use that in an Orion sock pattern?  Sparkles! And the colors looked great together.  Except that Starry is super expensive too making these the Most Expensive Socks EVAR(TM)!  But whatever, they were going to be awesome. 

The pattern well written and as far as I can tell there's nothing wrong with it, except that it's toe up and I cannot make toe up socks. I knew this about myself 2 years ago, and I probably should have just switched them around to top down, which would have been really easy to do, but I thought I'd try once again in the spirit of adventurous sock knitting.

The problem is I have insanely high insteps.  With top down socks it's super easy to adapt for that, just make the heel flap way longer than you think is reasonable, pick up extra stitches along those extra rows, and then your gusset is longer before you get back to your original stitch count.  Voila! Socks that fit my feet.

(This is the only picture that is actually my feet)

For some reason the backwards calculating that is required to adapt toe up socks to fit me doesn't seem to come out right.  So when I finished sock 1 it was about an inch and a half too long /FAIL.

I even went and started the second sock, figuring I'd fix the first one when the second was done.  I got half way through the gusset increases when I realized I'd forgotten something a few inches back and that was it.  They were very bad socks and needed to sit in a corner and think about what they'd done.

After I registered for SS11, I figured it was time to take them out of time-out and finish them.  I didn't really have any problems with them after their time out and it took me a couple weeks to knit the whole second sock, then cut off the bottom of the first sock, remove 3 stripes, and re-knit the toe.

I love the way the color pooling goes across the feet.  It's subtle because the black breaks it up.   

There was so much yarn left over that when Double Heelix came out this summer I knew what I was making it out of.

These socks are absolutely charming to knit, and I am convinced that Jeny Staiman is a genius.

I was able to pretty easily adapt these to fit my crazy feet by casting on more stitches across the middle and decreasing them out as I went down or up the foot.  And the heel construction is just brilliant.

(BTW these are also not my feet, which is why they're saggy around the ankles, because my daughter's feet are about as long as mine but she has normal insteps)

I repeated the helixes on the toes of mine.  I love both pairs and wear them all the time now that it's getting chilly.

So 2 pairs of socks out of $58 worth of yarn isn't quite as crazy, right?  Especially when they're both so awesome?