First project after illness completed!

My long protracted issues around this med swap over left me unable to do anything for well over a month. I couldn’t craft, I couldn’t write, I couldn’t do crap on the computer, I couldn’t even read. For someone like me it was pure hell, so you can imagine how thrilling it was to finally be able to do something, really anything, and thankfully that anything started on my flight out of state. I had wanted to bring my support spindle with me because I was really curious about if I could actually spin on a plane, but I just wasn’t able to get what I needed done in time to do so, so I settled on socks literally the night before the flight. I can’t say I was just dying to make socks at that moment, but I have TONS of sock yarn and I knew I could grab some yarn, a handful of different needles, and my toe-up sock book (mainly just for reference) and make a pair of socks. Most of the socks I make I wing the patterns for so really this was the quickest craft choice. Plus, I always love adding another pair of handmade socks to my collection.

Really, I can’t put into words how much it meant to me to be able to pick up those knitting needles and start working on swatches and testing out different patterns while on the plane. Going anywhere from AK takes far to much time for me to be without a project! These socks will always mean something to me simply because of what being able to do something after over a month of nothing meant to me.

They still need a little bit of finesse to even out some stitching and whatnot, but I’m not displeased despite them causing me a bit of grief. Honestly, if it weren’t for the fact I was on a trip and just needed something to do I probably would have put the yarn aside for some other time. Since I hadn’t had tons of time I had just grabbed 4 different needle sets in what I thought might be the right range of sizes, starting with this set of square needles I’ve been dying to try out. Yes. I said square, the things are square! The theory is that they help even out your stitches and take some of the strain off your hands. Sadly I still can’t tell you how well they might work, a small swatch just doesn’t count. I move onto the next size up. Then the next. Then the next.

Then the next.

Then I was out of needles and in Nevada. Not. Cool. I way underestimated my sizes. With a little more time I might have gotten closer to guessing the right size, but ultimately that meant nothing when I found myself in a different state with yarn but no needles. I tried to use the largest size I had but after no more than the toe, I knew I needed a larger size. I was fairly sure one size up would do it, so K kindly looked up a yarn store in Vegas before we drove down to Yuma. Sadly they didn’t have nearly as many needles as I’m used to finding, and really no wooden ones which is what I normally use. Heck, they didn’t have many circular needles even, which I would have used as a backup to my preferred wooden dpns. They did have some metal DPNs in the size I needed, although what they had left were way longer than what I’m used to finding DPNs in. Thankfully they were sanded or powder coated, so I was pretty sure the yarn wouldn’t just slide off, which is why I normally hate metal needles. I grabbed the long needles and the shorter ones the size up from that, they were only like Five dollars so why not I figured.

Thankfully. Because the long ones were STILL too small. I can only blame having been messed up for a month on being that off on my guessing, that and the fact I rarely use yarn quite this thick to make socks with nowadays.

Whatever, I was finally off to the races! I knit up a storm, having to rip out a couple of times, but that’s not all that weird when you are making up your pattern as you go. Occasionally I swap everything over to the circular needle I had on hand and tried my sock on and things are going well. I breeze through and get to the end of my sock, it seemed big, but even on the circs it’s hard to tell until you are off the needles so I finish off.

Dang it. They are too big. Rather the leg was too big, everything else was fine, they were wearable. But would I? Would I wear socks that drove me crazy and just looked slouchy? Would I rather wear the slouchy, in the house only socks, or would I rather have to rip my new sock down to the heel? The heel that is the trickiest part and that could be a real pain in the ass if I accidentally ripped them down too far or dropped a stitch.

I ripped them out. I really didn’t want to, but I knew myself. I knew they if I didn’t rip them out they would bug me to the point where I would likely almost never wear them.

Thank goodness I did, because once I was finally done with both of these I realized I had almost nothing left of my yarn. I would never have had enough yarn to have made a second sock just like the first, I would have had to have ripped the original out anyway. That makes me feel better about the fact that ripping the sock down to the heel had been a little messy and had taken a touch of work to repair. Not to pat myself on the back, but they did take a skillful hand to repair. At one point I worried I’d have to start the heel all over again, but I persevered and saved my heel.

Sadly me making the leg thinner meant the pattern just would not work completely around the leg, and I couldn’t fix it to work out. In the past, I’d done a 2/2 rin down the back of a sock leg and not only did it look decent it helped tighten the leg a little bit. I had to do an odd bit of work to decrease and make the whole thing work, but i managed.

But my socks weren’t ready to be finished yet, oh no, they wanted more attention. I didn’t want to do a simple 2/2 rib, so I thought I’d try out a picot edge. I’ve done them before and I thought that little touch of fancy might finish my socks out nicely. When actually finished with the first sock I didn’t totally like rather loose sloppy look this gave them, but I moved onto sock two anyway. I figured I could always finish the second sock off differently if I still wasn’t sure and I could compare them. By the finish of the second sock, I knew I still didn’t like the picot edge so I tried the 2/2 and found I liked it just fine. Which meant I had to pull the picot edge on sock one out…but ah well.

They were trouble, but they were totally worth it, my’ finally able to do something’ socks.