Pair six in my yearly sock challenge of a pair a month. My overall aim with the project is to undertake either something new or challenging with each pair.

This month’s patterns is “Titania’s Revenge” (a sock that I have tried to knit twice before and both times ripped back) It seemed the perfect choice of pattern for June - the month of midsummer.

When I have previously attempted this sock, I have used a variegated colourway, which I felt lost the detail of the lace cuff. This time, to show the lace off to full effect I have picked out a semi solid colourway - Every Day Gray

I whizzed through the cuff this time around. Working in a solid colour made such a difference, the lace is much easier to “read” on the needles.

Then came the gusset.-and I remembered why I have cursed out this sock not once but twice before. Keeping the stitch count correct in the lace pattern whilst decreasing and moving the start of the round requires lots of attention.

Its not the sort of pattern that is easy to pick up and put down, so my advice if you are working this sock, plan some time out to knit the whole of the gusset section in one go. It is very easy to get lost with the changing counts. It took me about 2 hours to get through the pick up and decrease to the original number of stitches, which felt a good place to pause.

After taking a break my stitches were distributed 18 lace pattern 42 gusset and cable. The 18 lace stitches will take 36 rounds to decrease. That is 4.5 repeats of faux cable pattern - or to look at it another way for every complete cable repeat, the stitches between the lace panel markers should decrease by 4. I found remembering this to be a helpful sanity check. Finished a cable repeat ? Got 4 stitches less in the lace section? Phew. Yup. Keep going. This part took about 3 hours.

I have tiny feet, so once I had decreased all the lace stitches, I worked the remaining 4 rows to finish off a faux cable and headed in to the toe, keeping the faux cable running through this section.