This pattern is part of a series I made during our holiday in 2013 while travelling Northern Yorkshire, Scotland and Wales. I wanted to design a sock pattern for every place we stayed during that trip. We stayed on the coast of Northern Yorkshire that summer with its rich history for hand knitted ganseys. We visited Filey, Robin Hood’s Bay and Whitby. In Robin Hood’s Bay we paid a visit to the yearly Propagansey exhibition in Old Stephen’s Church; a low-budget exhibition organised by local Deb Gillanders.
Francis Meadow Sutcliffe was a Victorian photographer based in Whitby. He made many, many pictures of everyday life and everyday people in Whitby. In doing that he made also a very impressive document of local every day life during Victorian ages.
One of the pictures of Francis Meadow Sutcliffe impressed me so very much and this sock pattern is based on that picture.
There are a lot of stitch patterns known around Whitby. Yet, you very seldom will come across this particular stitch pattern. It’s a cable pattern over 6 stitches leaning to the left on a broader stockinet background. The cables on the stockinet background are separated by some garter stitches. The cables look very different from what we are used to see. Mostly the cables are made more pronounced by knitting purled stitches next to the cables itself. Somewhere I read a discussion about what you are actually looking at in this picture dating from 1906. Someone suggested the fisherman is wearing his gansey inside out. That this is not the case you can see on the lower half of the gansey that is knitted in plain stockinet, and you can see the same thing on the sleeves.
The socks in this pattern are designed to fit my husband with size 46, but they easily can be adapted to smaller feet.
SSSK November 2013 Sokkenbreien