A bit late, but I couldn’t not talk about the creation of Black Flame Candle, my contribution to the 2020 Super Sock Scarefest knitalong (Ravelry link). The general theme of the Scarefest is that all sock patterns are inspired by scary movies. Of course, what constitutes a scary movie varies depending on who you ask! That’s why this year I went with our household favorite Hocus Pocus. I knew I wanted something that would hopefully be immediately recognizable to the film, but I couldn’t come up with anything for the human characters. The next most memorable element, for me (besides the cat), is the ~Black Flame Candle~ that sets the whole series of events in motion.
At first I tried to find a decent picture of the candle itself - it seems to have lots of writing on it, and I thought maybe I could design a colorwork pattern that resembled the candle itself. Unfortunately, the movie is old and there are few enough closeups of the candle that this proved impossible. There are some really enterprising individuals out there who have made their own versions, though, should you need to decorate a candle for your own home!
From there, I decided to focus on the flame itself. I started looking up stitch patterns that resemble flames (or leaves; frankly they often look interchangeable to me) and finally settled on the one I used in this pattern. In its original state, it was single color (and the written instructions had all the knits as “k” instead of “ktbl” even though based on the reference image, they were clearly “ktbl”!), so I spent a long time swatching with two colors to figure out if I could make it mosaic. I really wanted that bright outline so the flame would look like the one in the movie - dark in the center, with the white-hot outline to show you it was burning. As important as swatching is, I still don’t like doing it, so my swatch was only 20 stitches on each side and about 4 inches long since I worked the pattern a few different times.
After I had the flame motif worked out, I had to figure out how to make it work on the sock itself. Since it involves an “intro” and “outro” section where the stitch count is less than the main repeat of the pattern, I had to figure out how to handle the making the sock fit the same circumference of leg in those sections. Hopefully I hit on the right balance of increases and decreases - I didn’t get too many questions about it during the KAL so I think so?
The great thing about having this pattern be part of a KAL is there are so many projects to browse to see all the different color combo ideas folks had! If Ravelry is safe to use for you, I hope you’ll check out the different takes each knitter had.
You can get the pattern from any of the links below!