I really wanted to use linen stitch and wrapped stitches in this pattern. They look so totally amazing when you are knitting with short repeat yarn and the linen stitch lends this almost watercolor appearance with the texture of woven tatami rice mats. At first I was just going to have columns of each vertically traversing the sock from cuff to toe, nice, simple, pretty. But kinda.. boring. I was up one night with Little Baby No Sleep and realized that those columns needed to move, either across the sock or back and forth, something, some movement, somehow. I originally thought about Cabling the columns, but really how much more complicated did I need to make the sock? Cabling and wrapped stitches? and not to mention that the linen stitch and wrapped stitches are less elastic than regular knitting and they pull in, the cabling would pull in even more and then the yardage requirements would skyrocket and eventually you would need 600 yards to make a baby sock. But those columns could move using increases and decreases instead of cabling, and the increases and decreases could be worked on the "rest rows" so that it was still possible to be slipping stitches and wrapping stitches and then moving them when they thought they were resting!
And so Waving Bamboo Socks were born, there are no rest rows until after the heel, but really, it just means that you are either on a shaping round or a pattern round. They have 1x1 ribbing on the cuff and a column of 1x1 ribbing on the side which can be used to alter the size if you need something different than the 2 sizes provided. The Linen stitch is A. Maze. Ing. and flickers color from the heel flap as well as within the diamonds created by the moving columns of wrapped stitches. And just when you are getting tired of all that patterning, the chart opens up for columns of bamboo and linen stitch across the foot.
The yarn used for this pattern is a new one called Supersock+ from AbstractFiber in the colorway Pendleton, but it also comes in other amazing colors that you can purchase at Paradise Fibers very soon!
