Sunday, February 12, 2006

Down the Rabbit Hole

These days, I only knit socks. I learned to knit when I was 3, so have been knitting for about 35 years now and never really accomplished much with it...until I discovered sock knitting about 4 months ago. There is a wake of abandoned projects over the years because I, well, just got bored with whatever I had started or just went off knitting for a while in general. But then came socks.

It took a good book to turn me onto sock knitting, specifically, A Good Yarn by Debbie Macomber which revolves around a sock knitting class, using the socks on 2 circular needles technique. Now, the most likely reason I never considered socks before reading this book was that I always loathed working with double pointed needles. I just can't knit fast enough with them and was always losing one thus rendering the set useless and the project abandoned.

I'm not a patient person. Nor do I have a particularly good attention span for projects.

Socks are a small, very portable project. And there's no endless expanse of mind-numbing knitting before you get to the next fun part. By the time you're ready to chew walls with the ribbing of the cuff, you get to start the leg...by the time that gets dreary, whee, there's a heel to create and all the interesting stages of that process, then, by the time you're tired of thinking about the heel, you have a nice easy stretch of foot and by the time you get bored with that again, voila! a toe to shape.
The only downside is that once you finish the first sock of a pair, you have to do it all over again unless you're one of those who knits 2 socks simultaneously on circulars. I haven't tried this yet as I've not suffered too badly from "second sock syndrome" but may give it a whirl to shake things up at some point.

Since mid-October, I've knit a grand total of 18 human socks and 4 pairs of miniature/doll socks...I knit 6 pairs of varying complexity as Christmas gifts for my family (they were a huge hit).



Currently on the needles are Cat Bordhi's Leaf and Tendril socks. These have made my brain and fingers hurt, but I think they'll be nice in the long run...working them in Opal Uni 1264 (Teal).

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