Sockupied design calls can sometimes be hard if I don’t have a design already burning in the back of my brain.  In the case of Devil at Crossroads, I’d been fooling around on a train ride back from North Carolina.  I’d read about helix knitting on TECHknitting.  Naturally, when I learn something new, I like playing around with it to see how far things can go before they “break.”

The result of this brainstorming was this small little swatch.

So I put together a design proposal for Sockupied.  A little hint here: Sockupied when they give you the spec sheet (the document that tells you how to format your patterns), have a page where there are these little “mini-prompts.”  If you choose to fill them out, they’re meant to be used as inserts or marginalia for the main pattern.  After I finished Totem, I started thinking about the prompts.  One of them asks if you would like to write a mini-article on a technique in your pattern.

I thought, why don’t I write a full article to go with the pattern?

My sub looked like this:

But when I attached it to my email, I mentioned that I’d be willing to write a technique article to go along with the proposal.  Anne, the editor at Sockupied, liked this idea.  They asked for both the pattern and the article.

What are some of my thoughts on this proposal?  Well, I was pretty proud of my new layout for design submissions – the new logo, the boxes with the different color.  My swatch has a rather glaring mistake in the cable – I missed a shift and had to compensate.  I figured that the editor’s could overlook the mistake, which seems to be true.

In the proposal, the cuffs at the top of each sock are a different color.
 In the final piece, I chose to keep the helix stripping going up the entirety of the sock.  I think it was a better choice, simply because I didn’t have to write in the final pattern that each cuff would be a different color.

And on a final note: I didn’t name these socks.  CPAAG, a group on Ravelry, is a wonderful resource for coming up with names.  I’ll be using the benefits of their collective genius for time to come.