Skew Askew

This blog's been all numbers for a few posts now, but I thought I'd remind my gentle readers that indeed, I do knit (albeit slowly) and occasionally, I have an FO to share. Today is one of those fantastic days. An FO! Skew, that fabulously unconventional sock from Lana Holden. This was an incredibly fun knit - and really, not too challenging once I let go of any sense of control over the pattern. This is a good pattern for striping yarn (although the logistics of the pattern did result in a small amount of pooling around the ankle). The socks fit quite well - though as many, many knitters note, they are tight to get on. Full details of my Skew available on Ravelry.

Sadly, the only picture I have of my beautiful skew was captured with my computer's built-in Photo Booth. Ho hum, I know. I'll try and do better this weekend.


Imagine, however, my surprise as I was editing the project details when up popped this little gem:


Be still my heart - dynamic analytics from Ravelry? I swooned! Then I checked out the data - nearly 90% of respondents rated Skew a 4 or a 5. What an endorsement! (Disclosure: I gave it a 4 for 2 reasons: (1) the kitchner stitch around the heal was fiddly and (2) a normal cast-off for the cuff? Really, after all that?). The mean difficulty rating was a 4.3, which places it as an interesting but not mind-boggling knit. (I rated it a little more difficult because I couldn't intuit my way through the pattern.)

Finally, a little appreciation for how quickly this pattern has spread. Released as a Knitty Winter surprise in early February 2010, this is the little pattern that could. As of this writing, there are 1000 Skews in progress or completed. 3194 members have queued this origami-like sock. All told, that's 4194 possible skews, roughly 28% the number of Fetchings... okay, that's a little misleading. Looking at the queuing figure, the rate of queuing looks fairly chaotic over the short term, but following the spike upon release (wow - 1062 in nearly a day?!), it's actually leveled out - sort of.

I can't help but wonder what might have been if Skew'd been released nearer to the summer Olympics...