The FOlio: The Yamadori Socks

In the FOlio, I reflect on a finished knitting object and what the process of knitting it taught me.

Pattern : Yamadori (Knitty link-free pattern)
Designer: Ema Marinescui (@ito_ishi on Instagram)
Yarn Used : Mystery Yarn from Webs (attempt one), Knit Picks Felicini  in Bowling Alley (attempt two)
Knit from : October-December 2019 (attempt one), December 2023-present (attempt two)

Lesson: When to admit that the yarn and the pattern just aren’t meant to be together.

It took me a while to really get into sock knitting. When the very first commercial self-striping yarns came out from Lion Brand I knit myself a couple pairs of vanilla socks, but they lost their novelty so quickly that I only knit up two of the three colors I’d purchased.  It wasn’t until I won a Knitty giveaway copy of Linda Kopp’s great book The Joy of Socks and started trying the patterns within that I realized I should be approaching sock knitting the same way I approach hat knitting – trying as many different constructions, techniques, and stitch patterns as possible to make the kind of socks that best fit my feet.

I’d had the Yamadori pattern favorited as soon as it came out on Knitty in 2018, but the pattern suggests variegated yarns work best and I didn’t really have anything I thought would be suitable until I acquired a mystery fingering yarn grab bag from Webs and found within a beautiful variegated yarn with shades of teal, brown, and yellow.   Perfect for Yamadori! I thought, and cast on.

I was approaching the heel turn on the first sock when I started to sense something wasn’t going right.  The color repeats in the mystery yarn were just long enough that the colors began pooling in ways I really wasn’t loving – instead of the cool blending stripes like in the pattern photos, I was getting big pools of teal, particularly around the ankle.  My progress slowed but this was in my subway commute knitting days and this was the only project I had suitable for subway knitting, so I kept going.  

And then, one morning – disaster. My coffee mug came unscrewed in my bag and leaked all over everything, including my in progress sock (thankfully I hadn’t actually made it to the subway yet so I could run back home and change).  I had to set the stained sock aside until I had time to assess it that evening, and when I did I realized that if I had to pull the needles out to wash the coffee out anyway, maybe it was a sign I should just unravel, wash the yarn out and knit something else. (I actually took the below photo as I washed it out, realizing I wanted a photographic reminder of why I gave up on this pattern.)

I actually very quickly identified a new pattern, the Show-off Stranded Socks by Anne Campbell (Ravelry link, free pattern), which had just enough of a difference in the way the stitch pattern worked with the color repeats to almost entirely avoid any color pooling.  In fact the resulting socks are some of my favorite winter socks (and the way the heel shaping works is particularly ingenious).  

I never lost my desire to retry the Yamadori socks however.  This past winter, when Knit Picks came out with their new, smaller color repeat Felicini sock yarn, I picked up a ball and decided to start again.  I think they are coming along much better this time:

In the end, it truly was just a poor match of yarn to pattern that caused my first attempt at the Yamadori socks to fail– in many ways my faulty coffee thermos saved me from continuing on with a project I already knew I didn’t love. This was actually the first project I ever frogged (as opposed to either forcing myself to finish or letting the unfinished object languish in my stash for years), and it turned out so well that I am now more willing to consider frogging when projects just aren't clicking for me.

Have you ever frogged a project because of a bad yarn-to-pattern fit?