Bird in Hand Farm

Bird in Hand Farm is an imaginary place.


Sunday, February 13, 2011

Do not be afraid of socks

Many knitters are freaked out by knitting socks.  Maybe it is the itty bitty, double pointed needles; where it looks like at any moment all the stitches are going to go sliding off.  Maybe it is the skinny yarn that means it is going to take a million stitches to get anywhere.  I think mostly though, it is the dreaded heel turn.  For many knitters, turning a heel is almost as scary as steeking.  Having never steeked, I cannot tell you if this is true.  I can tell you that for the first few pairs of socks I knit, I would cheer every time a heel was successfully turned.  The Farmer cheers when the Steelers or Yankees do something good.  I cheer when needles and string produce something that will cup around my foot...

Like I said yesterday, love to me is warm hands and feet.  Especially when the outside world still looks like this:

I decided to make the farmer a pair of red socks for Valentines Day.  Two yarn shops later, I still cannot find a tweedy red that I like.  I kmake the mistake of telling him my plan and he picks out a tweedy, forest green.  In chunky weight.  Pause.  Okay, I can work with this.  I hit Ravelry and narrowed down the pattern search to: socks, knitting, free, unisex, and chunky weight yarn.  Amazingly, I still had several patterns to choose from. 

I chose Chunky Socks by Arlene Williams.  I modified the rib to a 2x2 rib ('cause that is what I wanted) and there may be a mistake in the heel decreases.  After the first heel decrease I knit three rounds. But after that, every other round was a decrease and that worked well.  Despite that, I think this would be a great pattern to jump into making socks.  They have all the parts of a real sock.  You get to use really big needles.  I knit on 6's.  They were done in less than a week.  They look like thick socks, not some kind of clunky, knit slippers that one of my grandmas used to make.  

Best of all, the Farmer has warm feet.  That's love.

3 comments:

  1. I get an abnormal pleasure out of turning heels ;-), probably because I always heard it was so hard and it really isn't.

    Steeking, however, scared the (*&##$ out of me.

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  2. They do look lovely and warm. Once I'd done one sock I was fine and totally over the scary but I am still inexplicably scared of toe up socks. My Valentine got hand knit socks as well.

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  3. I don't consider size 6 needles to be huge. ;)

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