A Tale of Two Tabbys

If you’ve ever come across Turtlegirl’s Bloggy Thing on a Tuesday, you are familiar with the Terrible Twosome, Calvin and Ripple. A few months ago, Cristi designed a complimentary pair of socks in honor of her boys.

The Calvin & Ripple Socks were chosen for the Q4 Knit-A-Long for the Socks that Rock group on Ravelry. I’d been wanting to knit this pair anyway, and the pattern is discounted through the end of this month in honor of the KAL, so I signed up and started knitting.



Independently, these socks were fairly quick knits. They took three weeks to knit primarily because I was focused on other things. Specifically? The marathon week focused on Big Thaw, which has been loitering quietly in a corner for almost a full week now.

I knit Calvin’s sock first.



I really liked the slip-stitch pattern and the sock zipped right along. I fell in love with the mistake rib on the back of the sock. I will most certainly use this stitch pattern again!



Although Cristi did a fantastic job of reverse-engineering Cat Bordhi’s Riverbed architecture for Ripple’s sock, I like my toe-up socks, so I plunked the Ripple stitch pattern into the Riverbed master, same as Calvin. I did the bulk of the leg watching football on Saturday and Sunday. The Ripple pattern has a 4x2 "rhythm" while the mistake rib has a 2x2 "rhythm." I kept screwing up by forgetting which needle I was on (front/back). Spent more time tinking than normal on this sock, but that's OK.

Toe Pic!

As all of you know, I prefer to do a garter toe vs. a standard toe. So when I decided to do a standard toe on this pair of socks (I felt the garter toe would not work well with this pattern), I effed up the toe on the Calvin sock (in the back in the above photo). Oh well. It still worked just fine in the “big picture,” which is why I didn’t bother to go back and fix it. So we’ll just call it a design element and move on, m’kay?

Calvin & Ripple Socks

Pattern: Calvin & Ripple Socks by Cristi H. Brockway
Yarn: STR Lightweight in Dreidel
Source: Blue Moon Fiber Arts
Needles: US1/2.5mm Hiya Hiya 16” circs (2-circs method)
Started: 5 October 2009
Finished: 25 October 2009
Mods: Did the Ripple sock toe-up. Chose the plain toe option on both socks.