Summer Swatch Me Week Five!

This week, our Swatch Me stitch pattern is Trails. For those of you working on the Summer Swatch Me Sampler, the chart is now posted at our group! I apologize for this week's delay, but we had to fetch BadKitten from the heart of Amish country and relocate her for the next three weeks of her summer adventure. Before I show you our special Trails pattern for this week, I will force you to see my weekend photographs... Here we are, driving through it. Amish country!
I had no idea how much goodness we would find there! First, right in the city of Lancaster we found the Quilt and Textile Museum, and took in an exhibit of traditional Amish quilts. It was lovely. Second, we drove right by Labadie Looms, in Bird-In-Hand, Pennsylvania. She has looms, spinning wheels, weaving and knitting yarns and spinning fiber. I was pretty impressed! Finally, we ate at a decent Thai restaurant in Lancaster...
We shopped for fabric (for BadKitten's next quilt) at Zook's, in Intercourse, Pennsylvania. The selection was overwhelming. BK selected edibles...
The Lancaster Bead Company, in Lancaster, has a tasty selection of my favorite type of beads (8/0 Japanese!) Left to right: Sparkling Metallic Gold Lined Crystal, Sea foam Lined Crystal AB, Transparent Gray Rainbow Luster, Cobalt Lined Sapphire AB, Amethyst Lined Crystal AB.
And in Intercourse, Pennsylvania, we found a really nice yarn shop with a good selection of yarn including this sock weight yarn that I had never seen before. It is from Knit One Crochet Too.
A buggy driving by...
The corn just goes on and on...
A farm across from where we stayed!
Finally, this week's special Summer Swatch Me pattern is for Trail Socks. I used Bear Foot sock yarn from Mountain Colors, in the Harmony Plum colorway. The yarn is soft, silky and strong. A great sock yarn and very nice to knit with.
This sock is knit from the cuff down and uses traditional sock construction, including a heel flap and a turned heel. They fit very well.
The colors really work, with enough variation to be interesting and not enough to distract from the stitch pattern. The pattern includes directions for making the socks mirror each other, which is a fun detail.
They have the BadKitten teenager stamp of approval!

For those of you working on Summer Swatch Me Bookmarks, our Trail Bookmark is worked in yarn from my FiberOptics collection of handspun yarns.

I'll be back next week with our sixth Summer Swatch Me stitch pattern. If you like what you see you can still join us. Read all about it here. Until next week, knit on!