So, now that I've described the surviving socks from post-Roman Egypt, I can show off my reproduction attempts. Since I do not spin, I was working with commercial yarn. The gauge of the extant socks in Coptic stitch is generally between 8 and 12 stitches per inch. Estimating stitch gauge of the complex stitches is a bit more difficult, but as best I can determine, the yarn thickness is comparable in the complex stitch socks, if not slightly thicker. I was able to obtain a gauge of 8.5 stitches per inch in the Coptic stitch with fingering weight/sock yarn.
My first attempt at making these socks was a bit of an experiment. For teaching purposes, I made one sock in nalbinding and then reverse-engineered a pattern in order to knit the other one. This was educational for me, but also helps me when I'm teaching about nalbinding. It allows me to show students both how similar twisted-stitch knitting is to Coptic nalbinding and how one can distinguish between the two. I chose red, since it's well documented among the surviving socks. The adult size socks in Coptic stitch are generally all one color.
You can see the cords tied around my ankles in the photo. This seems to be the way these type of socks would have been worn. Since I had very little information to go on as far as making the cords, I did a simple finger-loop braid of 3 loops.
For my second pair of socks, I was trying to perfect the fit around the heel and ankle. You can see in the photo above that the red socks are a bit loose around the heel and ankle. I determined that I started the heel flap too soon, which results in the ankle being too big. I also made the heel flap a bit too wide, which causes the corners in the back to poke out, rather than lay flat against the foot. I did correct these defects in the second pair of socks. This photo shows what I think should be the correct fit around the heel.
I chose to make my second pair out of a very non-descript brown color of wool. These have an undivided toe. I decided to do this, since I was focusing on the fit of the heel and ankle. However, it turned out not to be any less time consuming than constructing a split-toe sock. Something that did strike me when taking photos of the socks, though, was that they curl up in a very similar manner to the socks in the museums (when the curators have not mounted them on foot-like or not-so-foot-like stand). This is due to the nature of the Coptic stitch.
For the second pair, I was able to look for more detail in the surviving socks about how the cord ties might have been made. In one particular sock from the British Museum, there are surviving remnants of a cord around the ankle. It is a simple twisted cord, appearing to be the same width as the welt across the top of the instep (which takes on a twisted-cord appearance due to the way in which the sections are joined). So, I took a length of the same yarn I used to make the sock and doubled it, overtwisting in the same direction as the yarn's twist. I then pulled it through a couple stitches at the corners of the front slit before letting it double back on itself to ply into a twisted cord. This method was incredibly simple and worked well.
My third pair was an attempt to replicate some of the complex stitch socks. I chose to use the UOO/UUOO with an F2 connection, since this seems to be the most common complex stitch among the Egyptian socks. Since there are examples of both split toes and undivided toes among the complex stitch socks, I chose to make a pair with split toes.
The adult socks in complex stitches display more types of stripes than the Coptic stitch ones. So, I decided to go a little nuts and make this pair flashy. One thing I would do differently in a future pair is that the heel flap on this pair came out too short. Since the coplex stitch socks use a triangular heel flap, rather than a rectangular one, I was decreasing on either end of the short rows of the heel flap. The rate of decrease ended up making a flap shorter than I really needed to fit my foot. I thought that the stretch of the fabric would even that out, and it kind of did. However, I noticed that some of the extant socks have a couple rows worked back and forth along the edges of the heel flap before the work continues around to form the top of the heel and the ankle/leg section. Like this sock from the British Museum:
Was this a way of adjusting for a too-small heel flap? It's hard to know for sure, but it can certainly work that way. And had I noticed this earlier, I might have tried it. This will be something I can try for a future pair if I run into this same fitting problem again.
So, these are my Egyptian style socks so far. More to come, hopefully.
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