What part of International Speed Sock Knitting Competition do you not understand?

This is a super ugly photo of some unblocked socks.

I am out of Sock Madness.  I was 2nd to turn in Round 6 socks by about 2 hours.  I worked every day this week, and sometimes went from substituting to tutoring.  On Tuesday, I subbed from 7 - 2, then drove straight to Bellevue College and tutored until 8:00 pm.  And I still managed to knit these socks in 5 days.

I stopped doing updates because I didn't want to spend any time doing anything but knitting.

So I will try to show you what these look like:

The cuffs are double knit.

The legs were so interesting to knit.  We knit the double knit cuffs together to reduce the number of stitches on the needles, then knit the legs.  The front of the legs is color work, but not necessarily in the round.

The back of the legs are ribbed in a single color.  I knit the front, then dropped the contrast color and knit the back.  Then, I knit the next row of the front, slipping all the stitches that were supposed to be in the contrast color.  The main color was then dropped at the end of the front. Then, I turned the socks, and purled all of the stitches that had been slipped in the contrast color.  The next step was (since I was using a single circular needle) to slip all the stitches around on my needle so I was ready to continue with the main color.  I knit another row on the back, and when I got to the beginning of the sock, I had both colors. and was ready to knit another row of colorwork on the front.  This continued for about 5.5 in.  If I had been using double pointed needles, it would have gone a bit faster, but it wasn't too bad.

At the end of the leg, you add stitches so the heels can be double knit.

The heel flap is a double knit Eye of Partridge heel.  I am amazed that I understood how to do it.

The foot was also a combination of double knitting (the sole) and colorwork (the instep).  This is the pattern on the double knit bottoms of the socks.

When I was ready to knit the toe decreases, I had to add more stitches to the instep (top) of the socks so the toes could be double knit.

I stayed up past midnight every night and woke up at about 5 am each morning to try to get in a bit more knitting.  I do wish I had not worked these days, because I would have won.  Pookie told me that making money is good, too, and perhaps a bit more important than knitting socks.  He also told me that a sock knitting competition wasn't as cool as playing croquet.

But, he did do the dishes, and he brought me a smoothie when I got hungry.  He also just sat with me and encouraged me, so I told him that if I won, I would dedicate the final round to him.  Oh well.

Peace.
f1bercat
shaping the planet with some super thick socks.