Yarn tales

Started knitting my fourth sock today, the first two were trial socks, this pair is for my sister.  It will be the first completed project I've done for someone who is not me, Hubby's sweater is still half done.  I started the eternal sweater when we were engaged, and promised to finish it for our wedding anniversary.  Happily I didn't specify which anniversary.  This year will be our ninth and he said it would be a great to have it for the tenth anniversary.  I'm still working on it, but after so long on one project, I had to finish something, anything.  Now I think I'm hooked on socks, partly because I can take them with me anywhere, partly because of the satisfaction of doing a sock start to finish in under a week.

I found the Sock Knitter's web page, and their Yahoo group, grazed in the archives, hunted for heel techniques, read debates on different needle types and yarn types, found more patterns than I thought possible, and some of the funkiest yarn I've ever seen.  Seems knitting has become hip for no reason in particular, Debbie Stoller's book Stitch n Bitch has sparked knitting groups around the country, including on in my city that I haven't been to yet.

Amazing how relaxing it is to knit.  Two (or four, or five) needles and soft yarn that has been near a sheep at some point, even if you do need to be an octopus to manage turning a sock heel properly without shedding needles.  It's an engineering challenge.  The Knitting Geek is not alone, here is another geek knitting, and there are many more.  There's a logic to it, engineering goes into the construction of darts, holes, patterns, turns, and cables, it's all loops within other loops, the only difference is how you arrange them.  Knitting a sock was a challenge because I'd never done work on multiple needles, picking up stitches, short rows, Kitchener stitch (which I never want to do again), or slip stitch reinforcement before, but now I can produce something convincingly sock like.  Now the challenge is to do it better.

To be a "real" knitter, it seems I need to have a gallery of my FO's, or finished objects (as opposed to UFOs, or unfinished objects).  Got to get the lingo right.  I'll make a gallery next month, starting with my first two pairs of socks, too much going on right now.  I'm going to need a weekend to recover from the weekend.