My mascot project for the 4th Knitting and Crochet Blog Week. I chose House of Bee as my House - I like having multiple projects on the needles. When thinking about a mascot project, I was inspired by summer picnics and fresh fruit and how the picnic fun can be interrupted by busy bees who also want to enjoy the sweet fruit.

So - the berries and cream colorway is the perfect fit for this mascot project. I really like how this colorway works up and how the pattern shows it off. So far so good. And the pattern makes me think of the hexagonal structure of the beehive. Mascot project all the way!

Quick notes: I didn’t follow the heel instructions; instead I knit a short row heel. Since people said that the sock was tight across the food, I wanted to do the short row heel with extra gusset decreases as described in this Knitty article. But I should have added extra stitches before getting to the heel separation, so I just knit their short row heel. It uses double decreases which was new to me. If you’re having problems with gaps you could also use this gapless short row method.

I highly recommend cabling without cable needle method since you’ll constantly be shifting stitches around. Also, I knit this on two circular needle which meant shifting the first stitch to the end of the previous row and back, depending on which part of the pattern I was knitting (mostly the second half of the pattern). I knit 3 repeats before starting the heel.

I knit the heel across 34 stitches to make sure the transition to the instep wouldn’t be to tight. Once I was finished with the heel shaping I picked up two stitches - one at each end of the pattern needle to get an even number of stitches to make my life easier when knitting the toe. That way I could also start with a purl stitch for Row 1. Plus it helped eliminate any gaps.

I also distributed the stitches across the two needles in such a way that I could start the pattern again on row 1 - the picked up stitch became a purl stitch, and I ended on a purl stitch. So far so good.