With the prevalence of commercially made printed socks (especially novelty socks), you really need to see how bad commercial sock knitting is.

Commercial Sock Knitting Makes a Really Shitty Sock

When it comes to colorwork and knitting, there’s really only two basic methods. Stranded, or jacquard knitting for mixing colors in each row and intarsia for distinct blocks of color.

Companies that manufacture (machine knit) socks do a shitty job at both methods.

I recently bought a Costco-size package of ankle socks.

Other than the excessive logo display (including a profile of a puma which you can only see the tail of), these socks are exactly what I was looking for. They fit well, they’re cushion-y and not too thick.

Anywhere where the sock has a print design in charcoal gray, they use either stranded knitting or intarsia knitting. And I can tell, by turning the sock inside-out.

I honestly think this is a really bad example of lazy manufacturing. Yarn strands and ends hanging out all over the place.

There was a similar so-called feature to some HRC socks I was gifted a while ago.

Each of the colored blocks had black yarn-floats behind them and since that seemed to pull in too much, they cut them. Yes cut them. It created a very colorful rainbow fringe inside the sock.

For the folks I know who hand-crank socks to sell, this kind of “finishing” would be completely unacceptable.

Current Crochet

Completed one more color stripe on the Crochet Short-Sleeve Shirt since Wednesday.

I knit it seems to be going slowly, but I’m still enjoying the creation of this interesting fabric. After all this work, I really do hope it turns out to be a wearable garment.