Quote Originally Posted by Pleater View Post
It looks as though the crosses start at the ankle with different colours - blue on the left ankle red on the right. Maybe one is just pulled up harder than the other.
As best I can tell, both of his socks have a red X on the front at the ankle and appear to be constructed the same. He appears to just have his right sock pulled up a bit higher than his left, leading to the cuffs not aligning the same. MacLeay seems to have captured this with attention to detail, rather than evening them out in his painting to make it look more tidy.

I opted to knit my cuffs with a hard fold point at the top and bottom (by switching to purl rows at the fold points) so I would avoid that problem. It does give my cuffs a slightly different appearance with more defined borders, but it made more sense to me to do it that way for pattern alignment.