I’ve been looking forward to this announcement for months! If you’ve never seen the show Jane the Virgin, first, you gotta check it out. (I watched it on Netflix.)
Not only is the show itself great, combining high-drama telenovela plot points with extremely relevant and social commentary, but the color palette is to die for (to dye for??). Every episode is a feast for the eyes with bright corals and oranges contrasted beautifully against a range of teals and blues.
I couldn’t stop thinking about all the different colors, and my natural inclination when trying to translate some inspiration into knitting design is to go to a sock pattern! Thus, the Jane the Virgin sock series was born.
The first sock in the series is inspired by Xiomara. She wears a lot of bright colors and geometric patterns and is no stranger to flirty dresses. I figured a sock design inspired by her would be in a loud color and have plenty of bling. It needed to be something as fun as her personality!
I went stash-diving and came up with some Scientific Sock from NanoStitch Labs in the red-orange colorway Rachel Carson. Thanks to a bead-buying blitz last year in preparation for Sock Madness, I already had some shiny silver seed beads on hand. I had originally planned to include a LOT more beads in the texture pattern on the instep, but had to abandon that idea when I realized…I love the look of beads don’t like beading that much! Thus, the beaded cuff was born. Once you get those beads done and out of the way, it’s just cables that flow into a point and some easy texture in between.
It’s important to me to provide both charts and written instructions, but as it turns out, having all those charts created a LOT of written text! With that in mind, please don’t panic when you see the page count on this pattern. I usually print my knitting patterns out so I can carry them around with me, and I have Opinions about what type of patterns are easiest to print, so I collected the written instructions for each size into their own sections rather than mixing them all together. Hopefully that makes it easier to decide which pages to print and saves you paper and ink.
Because of the many charts, adjusting the size of this pattern would be more complicated than simply adding X number of stitches for an additional repeat, so I created a spreadsheet that should do the math for you! It has the option of adding calf decreases should you need it. I created it in Google Sheets and tried to protect all of the cells except for the ones you need to enter your information in the hopes of avoiding any accidental editing. (As it turns out, you can’t upload Excel files to Ravelry.) I learned a lot about the limitations of Excel and Sheets this week.
Xiomara is 15% off for its first week, no code needed! If you’d like to find out about the rest of the socks in this series and get subscriber-only discounts, please join my mailing list.