I am excited to be puttering away at a new legwarmer pattern. The idea is to have it work for more heights than the first one I wrote.

I want the pattern to work for ankle warmers, up-to-the-knee standard legwarmers, and thigh-high legwarmers, in one pattern. In order to make this more do-able (especially for those ladies with curvy/goddess leg shapes), I have been working with ribbing.

The first anklewarmer I made, I can wear happily. I had my friend Marie try mine on. Normally for the Road-Tested Legwarmer pattern, I would knit her four more stitches in Aran-weight yarn. That is something like an extra inch of wiggle room beyond my size.

It really worked. She can get *my* legwarmer over her knees in a snug, but comfy way. Score.

So I made a second ankle warmer at the same height/out of the same yarn as the first. Can you see what I didn’t see until I put these on for a photo?

OK, so the heights look uneven, but that is the camera angle and my pose. They are the same height, straight-on.

OK, the stripes don’t match up. That’s the nature of the beast, so I expected that.

It’s Mochi Plus yarn (a worsted-weight version of the Mini Mochi fingering-weight yarn that came out last year). For the record, this yarn is great for non-scratchy legwarmers… it’s really softly spun but has some nylon to give it even more bounce-back-ability than a lot of other soft wools and wool blends.

So if it’s not the stripes or height, what went funky? Well, the first one I knit (on the left/back leg in the photo), I worked a K2P2 ribbing. On the second one, at right here, I worked a K3P1 ribbing. Hmmm.

I like the smoothness of the 3 knits in a row, but it doesn’t stretch quite as well as the first one. It also is not reversable as K2P2 is, so a folded-over top cuff would have a different look (which is either interesting or distracting, depending on the knitter/wearer).

I am very fond of K3P1 ribbing as a general rule. However, particularly because of the extra stretch and the reverseability (is that a word?) of the K2P2, I’m leaning toward using that, as I had originally planned.

Input, anyone??? I am listening.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 17th, 2009 at 5:34 pmand is filed under Knitting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.