Friday, December 3, 2010

3 Sided Magic Loop

I should say that am not a big fan of Magic Loop for socks.

Its not that I don't think ML is a useful technique. I use it a lot for sweater sleeves and collars and other larger things where I don't want to bother with switching needle sizes constantly or just don't want to buy four different needles all in the same size to finish a project with a lot of different sized bits.

But for socks I work substantially faster on double points. They are more enjoyable to me and easier to get up a rhythm with.

Still, there are some patterns that really should be knit with a method that allows you to work a round in halves instead of thirds or quarters.

Right now I'm working on the Thelonious socks by Cookie A and these are a good example. They have a large traveling pattern that moves across half the stitches of the sock at a time. To do it on DPNS you have to stop every few rows to redistribute and there are sections where you wind up with very short and very long sets of stitches on each of the needles. Its just awkward to knit them this way.

So I made the call to do them ML. Now, one of my big issues with ML (and 2 circs for that matter) is that when you work the gusset on a heel flap sock you either have to cram a bunch of stitches on the back loop or else you have to divide the sock in half sideways or at some other awkward angle. Its either uncomfortable or fiddly to do the way I was taught.

So this sock I am doing something different:

Three sided magic loop.

Its just like regular ML. But with three sides.

I'm confident I cannot be the first person to figure this out, but I still feel pretty clever right now.

2 comments:

JeriBrock said...

I've been doing this since my first official pair of socks! I thought everybody did it this way. :-)

Kleigh said...

None of that now. No raining on my clever parade.