I don’t usually remove the wrappers from a ball of sock yarn – I work from the inside out so I need the wrapper to keep the outside end in place. However, this time I should have looked – I would have discovered that at ~200m into the ball I’d encounter a white strip to designate the start of the pattern repeat! Missed that. So I’ve ended up with two unmatched socks.

Mismatched Socks

I began the second sock by pulling yarn from the ball until I thought I’d got to a colour matching the start of the first sock. After six rows I could tell I was off and unskeined more yarn until I got a closer colour match. However, once I got into the second sock and came upon the white bit I realized what had happened. At that point I had two options – to undo the knitting back to the cuff, or keep going. I chose to keep going. I now realize I could have cut out the white length and most of the next 20 rows of yarn and likely got close to matching the first sock but that thought didn’t occur to me until I got close to the heel and by then I’d invested too much time to unravel back to before the white stripe. Instead, I unwound the yarn till I got to the start of the red section and began the heel, then brought in the blue after finishing the gusset and carried on with a blue foot. The result is two unmatched socks.

Surely one of my friends is comfortable enough to wear these socks as a “pair” – they’re as warm as all the others even if the feet are vastly different (the legs are somewhat similar).