FO: Ugly Duckling Socks

After finishing my watermelon socks, I was still on a sock making kick, but this time I decided to get a bit more experimental. I've had the Ugly Duckling Socks pattern for a while and for some reason decided to finally make it up. Sadly, this pattern has been discontinued by the designer and you can't get it if you didn't get it already, but it's a pretty simple design that looks deceptively hard.

This pattern is designed to integrate a self-striping yarn you don't love or maybe don't have enough of and make it look much cooler than it would have on its own. These socks are knit with mosaic knitting. It looks like lots of color work, but in reality it's a bunch of slip stitches. You do switch your colors, but not nearly as often as it looks, then the next row you would knit into the slip stitches you carried along, pulling the other color into the following row. It made for a very fun knitting process and made me constantly push to get through the full repeat of the checked design before stopping each time I knit them, which made these the fastest sock I've ever knit coming in at less than 2 weeks for the pair. 

The yarns I used were from my stash, and neither is ugly, but I wanted to use this purple striping yarn because I only had a little over half a skein. The purple is Lorna's Lace's Shepherd Stock Stripe in Amethyst Stripe that I got at a thrift store. It was really pretty, and I love Lorna's Laces yarn anytime, so I really wanted to use this and this pattern seemed like a great way to do that. The cream color is Premier Yarns Serenity Sock in White that I've had in my stash for ages from when I first wanted to knit socks many years ago. I think it's a nice color combination and helps the purple really stand out. The irony is that I started out these socks so I could use up the purple yarn, but it took literally half of what I started with. So now I have an even more awkward size ball of yarn lol. I guess I could make another pair of these socks to use up the rest someday.

This was also the first time I've ever knit a sock using anything larger than a size 1 needle. These used size 2, which I know contributed to the speed of getting them finished. I was worried they would turn out too big because of the larger needle size, but I trusted the pattern and it all worked out. They aren't as snug as my other knitted socks, but they still fit comfortably inside my boots on cold days.

I really did enjoy making these socks and I can basically guarantee I'll be making this pattern up again in the future. Maybe I can make up the purple yarn with a black grid? Who knows. But this pattern is a great one for breaking up a not so attractive yarn, so I will always have it in my back pocket for that. And it also works great for small quantities of yarn you have left over from other projects. Such a shame it's not available to download anymore. If you can find it online, I definitely recommend saving it :)