^{Source Here they are: Painted Desert Socks by Tressa Weidenar.}

Last summer, I took part in a #needleworkmonday peek-a-boo challenge. The idea was fun and, as so often with Hive, led me down a rabbit hole. I decided to try and knit the Painted Deserts socks as I had fallen in love with them when I saw them in a post by @mariannewest.

Even the name was romantic, calling up Brownsville Girl, a Bob Dylan song that has haunted me ever since I first heard it,

"... I can still see the day that you came to me on the painted desert/
In your busted down Ford and your platform heels ..."

It's a seductive song with a sort-of-a story line and pulls you in with modernist ennui and quiet tragedy, the kind the United States seems to excel in, lonely howling and misplaced pride, calling for and simultaneously pushing away connection. Hard to resist, it runs through American literature like a river.

The pattern called, too, the tension between the two colours and the sharp geometry between shapes and lines and columns. Blue and mottled pink, deep evening sky and the dry eroded shapes of the desert.

I was tempted into the mysteries of colourwork.

A week later I admitted defeat: the struggle of managing knitting in the round, not knowing how to hold two colours and maintaining tension with magic loop knitting when the cable in your circular needle is stronger than you are led to my downfall. Not to mention the one week deadline. Ha!

So I put them quietly aside and they lay there until January, when I started sorting which things I wanted to finish in February. They didn't make the cut, and sat quietly haunting me all through the month while I sewed seams, wove in ends, added buttons and, in one case, put away until next February.

In my mind, I was dreaming about that Painted Desert and all it meant and before the month was up, I had another swatch on the needles. This time I was using double pointed needles, and somehow I had learned to hold both yarns in one hand at the same time and alternate which one I threw, while maintaining an even tension on both yarns.

Here's the two swatches: the one on the left is the one I made using the magic loop method, and the one on the right I've just finished, using double-pointed needles. In the left hand one, you can see the puckered line of stitches where the magic loop led to uneven tension. In the right hand one, you can see the more even tension, especially in the line of vertical bars, creating by knitting with the floats on the outside of the work.

There's still some things I need to learn, for example, how to manage the floats on the back of the work. I managed the floats better in the first sample, where I was knitting with one yarn at a time, but this was very slow and didn't have the calming rhythmic movement that I so enjoy in knitting. I also need to re-learn how to do jogless joins in the round. One thing I really liked in the second sample was using twisted rib stitch for the cuff - it gave a firmer, neater finish.

The pattern recommends using Superwash Wool Fingering, a hand dyed yarn. I wanted cotton socks, so I'm using Regia Cotton sock yarn with KnitPro Zing double pointed aluminiun needles. I was delighted that my gauge was spot on, both stitches and rows - first time ever!

The socks are knitted top down. I'm going to start with a provisional cast on and knit between five and ten rows using waste yarn. I found the first few rows of the socks difficult to join and set up, this way, the awkwardness is contained in the waste yarn before I start on the stocking stitch part of the socks. When the main part of the sock is completed to the toes, I will come back to the provisional cast on and either replace it with the ribbed cuff or maybe, if I have enough yarn, make the socks longer - to the knee ideally.

Needlework Monday Knit Along (KAL)?

Would you like to do a knit along with these socks with @mariannewest and me? We'd have a launch post and then each week a progress post where you could leave comments (or links to your own post). There is also a support group that @mariannewest has set up on ravelry you can read about it in Marianne's post.

When would be a good time to start? Maybe Monday 4th April? What do you think?

How to measure your foot for a sock
Techniques for custom fit socks
The difference that well-fitting socks make
At 26:35 in the last video: A touching story about knitting custom fit socks for a knit-worthy person (knit-worthy = they recognised the work in knitting and the custom fit made a difference to them) - also about hand knitted socks lasting for nine years!

My original post about these socks with lots about yarn hand and yarn dominance

^{Three things newbies should do in their first week and, for most things, forever afterwards!}