The Bombadil-Sukat

A couple months ago, while browsing through sock patterns on Ravelry, I found this pattern from Ulla. I immediately fell in love with it. I'd been wanting to knit toe-up socks, loved the leaf patterns, and I liked the name. Tom Bombadil is my favourite character from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. The problem with the pattern is that it was in Finnish. Some patterns from Ulla have been translated into English, but this one had not.

My Finnish was limited to "Hi" and "Where's the bathroom?" which was not conducive to figuring out how to read this pattern. So I laboured over it with a Finnish-English dictionary and produced a rough transliteration which I turned into a knitting pattern. I speak the language of knitting, after all, so how hard could it be?

I cast on and started to knit with some yarn my mother gave me recently. Corafino Linie 5 in Hunter Green. Dark green, a little heavier than standard sock yarn, tightly spun, and nice and soft. I used about 1.25 balls of it for these socks.

There were a few snags. The recommended needle size was too big. I had to frog the toe and re-knit it with different needles. I managed to botch some of the cables by cabling the purl stitch over the knit stitch, rather than vice versa. My reading of the instructions for the heel was a bit rough, so the heels are there, but they could be better. The second toe is a tad bit smaller than the first one (not sure how that happened), but that's okay. It still fits.

These socks accompanied me to knit nights and the library, and to the PNE where it posed with me in front of a fountain made of brass instruments (there's also a picture coming of it with a very nice RCMP officer, but that picture isn't on my camera so it'll have to wait for a couple days). I knitted on it on the bus, and while watching movies.

And today, I finished the second sock. Here they are:

I like them very much. I'll probably knit this pattern again sometime, but with a different heel and possibly a longer gusset. I like the ribbing with twisted stitches, and the way the leaves turned out. Beautiful.