Way down south ...

A little knitter sat on a terrace


And knit!

H and I have returned from the deepest sunniest south after a wonderful bank holiday spent with my parents to celebrate a family birthday.

In our (combined) families we feel that to have just the one birthday on a day is under-egging the pudding, and that all birthdays should have at least two birthday girls or boys for full effect. In the combination of the two families we have only added to the mix and so Friday saw birthdays for my Mum, H's brother and my aunt.

Tophy was the happy recipient of the red and blue stripy bamboo socks from a previous post and when they (finally) arrived in Scotland he tells me that they fit and he likes them very much. Sadly they do not appear to have been enough to save his team (Middlesborough I believe) from relegation.

Mum had dropped a few hints a little while back about a need for cream lacy socks to compliment the rest of her sock drawer and as all dutiful daughters do, I set to work with alacrity.



If you have been reading my blog for a while, or are a Socktopus devotee (and if not, why not?!) you will recognise last summer's sock pattern - Fiori di Zucca (Courgette Flowers). I loved it in the pistachio green of the sock original but rendered in cream (002) Regia Silk the stitch definition is even crisper and there is a subtle sheen that gives the socks a warm glow.

Needles to say, they met with approval - and a willingness to model them around the garden:


(and yes, as an illustration of the socks this photo is useless; as a picture of my mother I like it!)

All this sock finishing spurred me on to finish H's second Fibonacci sock - to avoid him only being able to perform the 'one flying foot' sock picture pose.



I cast off to the closing refrain of the credits of our evening film of choice on Friday (Goodbye Mr Chips - the Martin Clunes version - highly recommended); and H popped the socks on and refused to remove them for the following 24 hours.

It did mean that I got lots of opportunity to take photos with a more than usually scenic backdrop:



And see H's attempt at the two feet flying foot pose!



I adjusted the socks to make a size mid-way between the medium and the large by increasing up to 72 sts (my normal count for H's socks) at the toe and simply increasing by 12 sts at the next two stages.

I found that the pattern as written, even for the large size, was a lot shorter in the foot than even I need so I carried on with the stage 2 of the foot pattern until I had 12 repeats, and then did the increases as written (or at least, as written with my adjustments). Confused? yes, me too - I left too long between the first and second sock to work out exactly what I'd done and had to reverse engineer off the first sock - clever no?

Anyway, H likes the socks - they have a clever feature on the feet that produces diagonal stripes across the feet which is a bit of fun, and although on the lighter end of sock weight yarn, they held up well to a good cliff walk on Saturday - success all round.