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.