Faraday by Helena Bristow

I LOVE yarns with crazy colors, hand-dyed yarns, and stripes, but complex lace and patterned socks get lost in the sea of crazy colors.

After much searching amongst nicely textured sock patterns to find one that would work well with heavily variegated yarn, I discovered that I would have to make my own due to the fact that every single one was cable-heavy (and I was on a cable boycott).

I was in love with the lace pattern from the “Radio Room Hat” pattern, and after contacting its author, I learned that it is a vintage stitch originally found in an ancient magazine of the author’s mother. So I adapted the stitch pattern into a sock pattern.

I’m calling the pattern ‘Faraday’ for two reasons: first, the polar opposite of a hat is a sock, and the opposite of a radio room is a room in which no radio can transmit. Uber-science-nerds are familiar with such rooms, called ‘Faraday Cages’ after scientist Michael Faraday.

It’s also amusing to me that this pattern was birthed from avoidance of cables. The pun here is that things without cables are often called ‘wireless’ (and radio waves certainly are wireless).