These Flying Geese socks were my first foray into designing knit socks. I used the traditional New England graphical pattern Flying Geese as the surface pattern, which I discovered in Robin Hanson's book Favorite Mittens. I used Tin Can Knit's amazing sock pattern Rye to help with the stitch counts and other details of the physical construction of the sock. I was determined to make the socks wholly in pattern, and designed the gusset (triangle right above the heel) myself to keep the pattern alive while the size of the area decreased.
Initial mockup of the sock in Excel, used to figure out pattern repeats and use of color.
To determine the color of the socks, I made mockups using all the yarn I had available, both as background and foreground. I ended up using E1 as it felt the most like flying winter geese on a cloudy November day.
This is my custom gusset design in pattern. In order to make socks fit human feet, there is a section called the gusset that is basically a decreasing triangle. I wanted it to have some of the geese in it, instead of being just grey and throwing the visual balance off, so I did some work to transpose a rectangular pattern onto a triangular surface.
