My Sock Story

Since I saw a pattern book for socks when I was a young girl (it was a rather complicated book on hand knitting argyle socks) I have wanted to learn to knit socks. A year or two ago, I successfully crocheted several pairs of socks, a pair for my stepdad, two for my mother, and two for me. Sadly, crocheted socks do not have as much "give" in them as knitted socks, and Mom's socks do not fit her - they are scheduled for demolition (I know it's called frogging, but demolition fits my mood about those socks) and then knitting. (If you want to see the crocheted socks, as well as a few other things that I've crocheted in the last couple of years, you can look at my Ravelry page. You might have to log in - I am not sure.)

In May of 2010, Danny and I stopped at a small yarn shop in Longview, WA, Evie's Yarn Emporium. I was looking for some stitch markers for the pair of socks which I was then crocheting, having dropped my last one under the seat in the rental car. Evie, who is a marvelously gregarious person, asked me if there was "anything else" besides the stitch markers - and I asked her about making socks. Nearly forty-five minutes later (during which time, Danny came in from the car because I had been gone so long that he had started to worry), I had a ball of yarn, a set of bamboo #1 double-pointed needles, a pattern, and a handful of handwritten notes and advice from Evie. That ball of yarn became my first handknitted pair of socks.

It was tough going, my first experience with double-pointed needles, but I wouldn't be stopped. I tried again, with #3 dpns and some sport weight yarn from KnitPicks. The second pair of socks came out better than the first, but I still felt that it took F O R E V E R. I wanted faster.

Blue socks - sport weight from KnitPicks. Brown - forgotten yarn name from Evie's.

Fast forward to spring of this year, when I had my Bond. I made my first pair of machine knitted socks on it, from Liberty Wool purchased at DownTown Knits in Apex. Danny liked them so well that I promptly made two more pairs. (Only two pair, the first and last, are shown below - the blue pair that were made between these two appears in another post, but you get the general idea...)

Top: first pair of machine knitted socks; bottom, another pair. Liberty Wool, Bond machine.

And then...I got a Studio SK-301. My next two pairs of socks were made on it, from KnitPicks' Felici Sport. These socks feel great on the feet, so great that I almost didn't give Danny back the pair he loaned me when we were flying to Oregon this year. But...the problem with these, as with the ones made on the Bond, was twofold: the toes had to be Kitchenered, and the flat-knitted socks had to be seamed up the side. Yuck. Yes, you don't notice the seam when you are wearing the socks, but YUCK for having to make the seam.

The Felici Sport socks, knitted on the Studio.

So...now I have moved up to knitting socks in the round, as I mentioned in my last post. Next...figuring out how to put on a ribbed top!

Oh...if you do go to my Ravelry page, you'll see that there are a pair of socks listed as WIP (work in progress) that are called Insouciant Socks. There is no photo yet as I'm not sure what to do with them - they are "complete" but are too short and fit "funny." I might have to taken them apart and knit them on a machine - but I spent hours and hours and hours knitting the darned things. See? Another reason to machine knit socks - if you don't like the result, you probably have at most an hour or two in each sock so it doesn't hurt SO bad if you decide to frog 'em!

That's my story...so far. I have quite a few skeins of sock yarn in my workspace, and now that I don't have to seam, they will probably be socks in short order!