Design Process: Three Seasons Socks

Some finished and unfinished striped socks in bright colours with dark grey stripes are laying on concrete tiles.

How about a little Three Seasons Socks design process post?

On very rare occasions, Gauge Dye Works and I hit on the perfect colour and pattern combo on the first try. This definitely wasn’t one of those times, so I thought I’d show you how we progressed through different ideas. The image above shows three “not-quite there” attempts to the left, and what we ended up with on the far right.

We started out thinking it would be cool to have a striped leg and a solid-colour foot. That kind of style makes it easy to design with whatever heel I want because I don’t have to worry about messing with the stripes. But neither of us ended up loving the solid foot even though the colours were spot-on and you can see we ended up with something very close to the original Autumn colour palette in our finished sock. We also didn’t really like the way the chevrons worked. They were far too tiny along the front of the leg. I decided they’d be a lot better if they were spread out.
The next try was alternating that dark grey that we’d originally had in the foot with the coloured stripes. This also gave me a chance to try out one of the other colourways, Summer. I liked the chevrons better, but I didn’t really think it looked great to have the chevrons in both the dark grey and the coloured stripes, so I wanted to try alternating having just plain darker stripes in between colourful chevron stripes. I knew how I felt about that iteration without knitting the entire sock, so I just bound off after a few stripes.
I was much more into the third idea with the dark, plain stripes alternating with textured colourful stripes. I loved the gradient. I also loved the short row heel I’d tried out for the first time. Since we were going to have stripes along the whole sock, my original plan of a heel flap and gusset wouldn’t work. Even if I’d used extra dark grey yarn for the heel, the stripes around the gusset would be narrower than all the others and I wanted them to be consistent. But I felt like the sock leg was too tall and I wasn’t sure about the proportions. So I asked Gauge to dye some yarn with narrower grey stripes.
That was the ticket! I really love how the proportions came out with plain, dark, narrow stripes, alternated with wider, bright, textured stripes. We did the same grey for each colourway, so they all really look great together.

Andrea’s feet in the pinks and yellows Spring version of Three Seaons Socks.

Andrea’s feet in the greens and blues Summer version of Three Seaons Socks.

Andrea’s feet in the greens, reds, and yellows Autumn version of Three Seaons Socks.

One other thing I had to take into account was that, depending on which size you knit, your stripes will be narrower or wider. Bigger socks would have narrower stripes since there are more stitches in every round and they’ll finish a stripe within fewer rounds. I also knew that the chevrons would have to be slightly different in each size. In order to make sure all the sizes still looked right, I knit up a mini sample of each one.

You can see below how I played with the number of chevron bits on the smallest size. I also just realized tha tI photographed the two pink samples upside down, but you get the idea. Those are the smallest size on the left (56 stitches), the second size in the centre (64 stitches), and the largest size on the right (80 stitches). I made the 72-stitch sock as my sample (in fact, I made six of them!), so I knew I liked that one already.

Three knitted tubes in varying sizes. The one on the left is in shades of grey, yellow, and green, and the two on the right are in shades of grey and pink.

Big thanks to my testers who loaned me finished samples of the different sizes so I could include the photo below in the pattern. I think it really shows the difference between each size so knitters won’t be surprised if their sock doesn’t look exactly like the sample images. It shows the socks from left to right, smallest to largest. You can see how much wider the stripes are on the 56-stitch sock than they are on the 80-stitch one.

Four colourful striped socks with slightly different width stripes.

I hope you enjoyed that little tour of our design process. We almost always go a bit around in circles before we come to a design idea that works well for both of us. That give-and-take is one the joys of collaborating!