cwBlog

I had a good night last night. I finished two socks.

What? No, I didn't start them both last night!

One was a sock from Katherine Misegades's sock booklet for [Tongue River Farm] (http://www.icelandicsheep.com) -- beautiful Fair Isle socks. I've written about these socks before. I bought a "sock kit" at Rhinebeck 2006: three 8-ounce (approximately) hanks of Tongue River Farm Icelandic sock weight yarn in three different "colors" -- natural white, natural brown, natural grey -- and the booklet. It wound up being a slight price break on the yarn, which was beautiful and luxurious, and the sock patterns looked interesting.

Well, the first sock pattern was a doozy. Misegades used a heel construction I wasn't familiar with: when you get to the point at which, on a standard top-down heel flap sock, you'd start working the heel flap. Instead, you work a pattern on the instep and heel, and start working a gusset between them. When you get to what would be the end of the heel flap, you short-row across on the heel, working ssk or p2tog at the end of the row to compensate for the gusset increases, and wrapping the following stitch to prevent holes. To add to this, the colorwork doesn't stop at all -- as you're doing all this complicated stuff to structure the heel, you're also doing all this complicated colorwork.

Because I wasn't familiar with the heel construction, and because it was apparent that all this complicated stuff (some of which I didn't understand) was going on at once, I decided to knit the socks at the size they were designed, even though they almost certainly wouldn't fit me. Well, in February I made a mistake on the heel turn on the second sock, and set it aside for a while. Last weekend I decided to fix the heel, and I ripped it back about two dozen rows (they were short rows, so this is not nearly so drastic as it seems), carefully picked up the stitches, and resumed work. Well, when I left for work yesterday morning I had both socks together -- as you may recall from prior posts, I needed to see the mistakes on the first sock so I could duplicate them on the second sock -- and so when I got off the train at my stop for work I had nothing left to do except work the toe.

So I had been meaning to visit one of the local knitting circles -- I've missed the camaraderie since I moved away from my old one. Well, last night I went to the West Branch of the Somerville Public Library, where Ravelry told me that knitters congregate. And I worked the toe there, and finished it. The knitters admired it, and asked who the socks were for -- and that's when I admitted that I had no idea, and they were going to go to the first person they fit. "Like Cinderella!" one of them crowed. Yes, exactly -- although I'm not going to marry the person the socks fit.

And that gave me such a rush that I immediately picked up my Noro socks and knit furiously on them -- I had made it to the ribbing, working toe-up -- until, just before midnight last night, I tried on the sock, decided that 25 rounds was enough ribbing, as it was approaching the bottom of my calf muscle, and I did not want to deal with shaping and ribbing at the same time. So I bound off the last stitch around 12:30, put on the sock, wore it around for a few minutes, and then went to bed.

And boy, after six hours of knitting, did I ever have strange dreams. The Yarn Harlot was in them, filing a restraining order against me. This is what happens when you watch Judge Judy -- my guilty daytime TV pleasure, from my grad school days, now watched a couple shows at a time thanks to the magic of TiVo -- while knitting. Last night's batch was heavy on the restraining orders and relationship stupidity.

And then, when I got in the shower this morning -- and this is almost certainly because the Fair Isle socks used it as a decrease -- my brain informed me that it understood the difference between the sl 1, k2tog, psso decrease and the sl2tog kwise, k1, p2sso decrease. That's something about being a verbal/symbolic and kinesthetic learner -- sometimes the only way to understand things, if they don't make sense to you visually, and you can't analyze them symbolically, is to do them. I understood that about the heel construction on that sock pattern, but I didn't understand it about the decreases.