I was expecting something similar to last year's A Song of Beads and Lace, and I was going to use a precious skein of Lanitium ex Machina sock yarn and knit a pair for myself. That would mean some extra work because of a larger size, but for some reason I thought that I'd like to have socks with beads. The pattern came out on Thursday evening at 10 PM, and at first, it didn't look like socks that I'd like to wear, so I didn't want to use the LeM skein for these. A quick stash diving gave me this yellow Handu Merino sock yarn with red speckles, and I had some red beads left after my Arkema gloves project, so I decided to work with those and go with the smallest size (XS) again.


I had to re-check the pattern a couple of times when knitting the bead parts. Half of the beads are on knit columns, half of them on knit-purl columns. The latter ones would be practically hidden during knitting as the purl stitches make it like ribbing and the beads disappear between the knit columns. Luckily, this changed after blocking, as it stretched the ribbing enough to show the beads.


The pattern didn't include a picture of the finished sock, only a picture of the front cables and the back pattern. The heel and toes came as a surprise, so you simply had to trust the pattern and see what comes out. At some point I did check the TdS forum so I wouldn't repeat the mistake of not noticing errata on time, something that happened to me on round 3. I noticed that the last beads were made optional, with extra points for using them. I didn't understand why they were optional, (maybe so the sock would feel better in a shoe?), and I thought that they would look better with all beads in, so that's what I did.


On this round, I wasn't really competing, as I noticed on the previous round that I can't win even if I tried to (I used to have a t-shirt with a slogan "If you can't win, don't play"). I also knew that I couldn't stay up all night and knit, so on Thursday evening I first spent 20 minutes extra for winding the unplanned yarn and then got started with the ribbing. On Friday, I decided to leave sock knitting at home for our anniversary dinner, and then on Saturday it was family obligations, such as kids' circus practice. I finally finished the socks just before midnight on Saturday, and to my surprise I was 44th at that point when the competition had started two days earlier. This wasn't a very difficult or slow project, so I'm assuming that quite a few people have given up. Let's see how many there will be on the last round. We know it's going to be something using 4 colors.