Knitting in the hospital

No, not me. I mean, yeah I was knitting in the hospital but I wasn't the patient. Before the hospital business started, I had started a sock with a regia tweed yarn, greyish blue denin with a few other colors thrown in for the tweed look. Usually I do socks toe up, leave the foot plain stockinette (I do rib the sole of the sock though) and after the heel, decide on a stitch pattern for the leg.

I'd done less than 2" of the toe and decided that this sock NEEDED cables, or at least a cable-y looking design, and it needed to be on the foot too, because a plain knit foot would be WAY too boring (to look at, knitting it is ok). I saw a post on the Socknitters list about a new sock pattern - Gated Vines sock pattern . BINGO! That would work, not heavily cabled, but definitely cable-looking. I printed off the pattern and tucked it in with my knitting to figure out how to convert the cuff-down pattern to my toe-up in-progress sock.

The next day, dh went into the hospital unexpectedly - for a week! By the time he came home, the sock was done past the heel and about 2" up the leg. I've only knit on it since then at the dr's for his followup appointments. I do want to finish the sock, and do the mate. I don't want dh in the hospital.

Converting the pattern turned out to be pretty easy. 'Convert' may not even be the right word, but it's close enough. I finished the toe, and then started the vine pattern on the center of the instep - the instructions tell you how to center it when you do the sock cuff-down, so that was easy. I didn't even think of turning the pattern upside down - I'm knitting it the same way it's written in the pattern (although I did graph it for myself, easier to follow than the text for me).

When the foot was long enough, I did a heel flap/turn heel, and then started the leg. The only tricky part was figuring out how to adjust my stitch count since I was a few stitches short of a full repeat (um, hmm, that doesn't sound right...) I figured I could do 1 st instead of 2 between repeats and you can also take off the first and last K stitch of the repeat with screwing up the design. That was enough to start the ankle and after an inch or so I added stitches to make 2 stitches between repeats and add back the 2 stitches to one repeat. The ribbing I'll probably do the same K3P2 as the pattern.

So, in other words, I did my regular toe-up sock using the lace stitch from the pattern.