Paraphernalia

The first time I saw this pattern was when Celestial (Nebula Designs) began knitting them, I immediately fell in love with the pattern and couldn't wait to see her finished product, but unfortunately she ended up having to frog her socks. :(

But the pattern stuck with me, and a few days later I popped it into my queue, ordered yarn, and soon cast on...after finishing a few other projects!

Project Specs:
Ravelry Project Link
Pattern: Paraphernalia
Needle: Knit Picks 47" circ size 1 (2.25mm)
Yarn: Knit Picks Essential (almost 2 skeins, colourway: Ash)

I'd like to quickly review the yarn: I've knit with the Felici (the "sister yarn") of Essential and loved it, supersoft and easy to knit and even after wearing my socks a few times I didn't notice any pilling or excessive wear. However, with the Essential yarn, by the time I arrived at the heel flap of my first sock, the whole thing was pilling like crazy! I was really frustrated with that, but I decided to keep on going since the yarn would be near useless if I frogged it and I knew I wouldn't want to knit it again anyway if I did frog!

Another issue I noticed as I continued knitting was that in the first skein, I found about five places where the yarn had been broken and then "split-spliced" together, the splice looked like the ends had been woven into each other so I'm not exactly sure what you'd call it. I also found about two of these "joins" in the second skein. Wasn't too happy about that, but since overall I've found Knit Picks yarn to be pretty high quality, I'm wondering if this batch of yarn was just bad or something? Thoughts?

Overall though, I definitely like these socks. The pattern is great and they look fantastic with jeans. The only mod I made was to add an extra cable (just 5rows more) to the end of each sock because they ended up being a little short for my feet...which to my chagrin happen to be an unabashed size 9. ;)