Don't you just love fresh starts? That's the lure of casting on. We get to begin anew with something that we still haven't screwed up ... yet.
This is the new Regia sock, about an inch into the cuff. (2x2 rib on size 1 needles, if you're interested.) Regia doesn't have clever names, or even unclever names, for its colorways, but this one is labeled Farbe 5752 which I think is the colorway. Partie would be the dye lot, yes? The rest of the ballband is in German, so I'm assuming Farbe and Partie are German terms. For blog labeling purposes, we'll call this one Regia grey striping socks. I think that makes more sense than sticking to the German numerical classification system.
Whatever. It's kind of a nifty assortment of greys with a few dots of smoky blue mixed into the jacquard portion of the pattern. It will knit into thick stripes of charcoal, mid-grey, and a greenish grey, with small stripes of white and smoky blue jacquard separating some of those stripes. I think it will work.
I looked at the Charlene Schurch sock book for ten thousand hours (ok, maybe a slight exaggeration) trying to choose a stitch pattern that would complement the yarn. In the end, I got lazy and decided to use my standard sock recipe for self-striping yarn. knit, knit, knit, knit, around and around in a spiral, with a heel thrown in for a brief dollop of knitterly interest. But hey, it works, and I can make this pattern in my sleep by now.
This will be my carry-around sock for the next couple months. It still amazes me that while waiting in line at the bank, the drive-through, etc etc, you can knit entire socks. Maybe that's one of the consequences of city living, but we sure do seem to wait around a lot.
At some point today, I hope to have time to fix a disastrous cast-off on my recently finished carry-along socks. Normally, I wouldn't cast on the new socks before completely finishing the old ones, but this is a special case. I mean "special case" in the sense of "almost lost my sock mojo and made a giant bonfire out of my sock stash because of this rotten thing." Details of my spectacular failure to follow.
