I'm thankful for ... socks.

It was an ... interesting Thanksgiving. This was the first Thanksgiving in my life I didn't spend with my parents, or with my dad. My boyfriend's family lives out of state, and his kids went to visit other family members they rarely get to see, so it was just the two of us. We didn't even plan anything for dinner, and so I ended up sitting on the couch All. Day. Doing nothing but knitting on my niece's socks for Christmas.

Finally in the evening I started to get hungry, and I said, "What are we going to do about dinner?" The only thing I had on hand to make was Hamburger Helper. I've had strange Thanksgiving dinners before (last year I think it was beef stew) - but Hamburger Helper really didn't seem like a great Thanksgiving dinner.

My boyfriend came up with a good point ... what's the traditional Thanksgiving dinner, sans turkey? Stuffing. Mashed potatoes. Gravy. Sweet potatoes. Pumpkin pie. Well, we had all of that but the sweet potatoes.

So he made us dinner of stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, and corn, with little pumpkin pie bites for dessert. We had the canned pumpkin and condensed milk and spices, just no pie crust. So he filled muffin tins with the pumpkin mix and just baked them like that, in paper liners. We topped them with Redi-Whip. Mmmmm.

It was pretty good, and we did the traditional thing of painful overeating, and overall had a good day.

Meanwhile, here's a picture of the progress of Socks The First. I have 3 pairs to make in time to mail for Christmas. It's going to be interesting. For the record, that second sock I only just started Thursday morning, and did all that in one day. It's amazing what an entire day on the couch watching movies can do for knitting progress. (I know, some of Those Knitters could have completed a whole pair of socks in that time, but ... for me, this is good, and I'll take it).

While I was taking pictures, I snapped this as well ... a close-up of those luscious Harmony needles from Knit-Picks. These are really beautiful. I will say that knitting with wood needles - even good quality ones - with merino wool on socks, with tiny stitches, can be a little 'sticky' from time to time. I think, ease-of-use-wise, I prefer my Addis. But these needles are so gorgeous, I choose to cope with the slight stickiness and use them anyway. This picture doesn't really do them justice. And the small sizes (these are 1s) don't have the same pattern as the ones shown on Knitpicks' web page, these are more simply striped - but still way cool.

So now we're off to brave the madding crowds. I generally refuse to shop on Black Friday on principle, but I actually have to go out, to one store, for two things - neither Christmas-related. I have been desperately jonesing for a new entertainment center for our TV, in my ongoing (sometimes futile) attempt to spruce up the house. Right now it's sitting on a trunk, with all the accouterments on a flimsy table beside it.

I'm very picky about furniture, and despite months of looking both online and in local stores, could not find an entertainment center I liked ... until recently, when I found the perfect one for only $70. But we never went and picked it up, so we're going out today to HOPE they still have one left.

And I need to get a birthday present for my boyfriend's youngest, whose birthday is next week but I will only see him this weekend, and must have it before tomorrow.

One brief foray into the madness, then I'll be locking myself back into the house for the weekend.

Socks! And Other Things.

I've finally got to start the socks. I finally got the proper measurement information from the family, and was able to get going.

I immediately ran into several snags (no pun intended). When I first started knitting socks, I never even tried on dpns (I'm not coordinated enough for that) - I learned on two circulars. I had never had a problem with second sock syndrome until my last pair. But they had colorwork in them, and I discovered that (a) I don't think I like stranding colorwork very well, and (2) I definitely don't like it in little tubes of socks. So when it was time to start the second pair, I put it off endlessly.

But I decided that for these Christmas socks, I was going to learn to knit two at a time on two circs, because I thought that I really would enjoy knowing that when I was done, I was done - with both socks.

The first mistake I made was to buy a book, thinking that might have more detailed information than I could find on the web. Wrong. It didn't. The books was "Knitting Circles Around Socks" by Antje Gillingham. If you're absolutely determined you must have a book to learn this technique, I believe this is the only one currently available. But I wasn't impressed.

The instructions aren't any more detailed or any better than whole tutorials I could find online. (I was going to give you a link, but I can't get my favorite one to work - socknitters.com, Sheron's 2 socks on 2 circs tutorial - try there; or Dogpile or Google it, there are several out there).

Of course, that's not the author's fault - she does what she says she'll do - gives instructions for knitting 2 socks on 2 circs. My bad for expecting her to have some magic secret not available to others who freely post their hard work online instead of publishing it in a book.

But she has 6 patterns also in the book, and I thought that might redeem it. Not so much. Four of the six appear to be nothing but repeats of the 'basic pattern' given in the beginning of the book as the instructions, just using different yarn. I say "appear to be" because I haven't knit all of these socks, or any of them for that matter ... but looking at the socks themselves, all four appear to be identical to the instruction pattern, except that of the four, two merely use a striped yarn, one a multi-colored yarn of some other ilk, and one plain color but with that mohair ruffle. The only two different patterns in the book are one with cables and one that is lacy.

Moving on ... second snag. All Ms. Gillingham's patterns are for cuff down. It didn't occur to me till I got ready to knit my Christmas socks, that I much prefer toe up socks. No information on how to do two toe up socks on two circs.

I "Dogpiled" (R)(Tm)(whatever) and found some instructions, all of which I found incredibly complicated. Neither was for short row toes, which I prefer.

I decided to wing it. The down and dirty version of my short row toes is that you make a provisional cast on with a crochet chain of one-half your total stitches; then you short row down till you have 8 or 10 or whatever you want left in the middle, work your way back out to the original number of stitches you started with, then unzip your provisional caston, put those live stitches on a needle, and viola - ready to knit in the round. I thought, I can figure out how to get these on two needles.

But I didn't think I could start out on two needles (really, I was too lazy to work it out), so I did them separate at first. I did my first short row toe on one circular needle (at this stage you only need one needle, not two). Then I did my second short row toe on my second circular. Then I slid the live stitches of toe 2 onto the needle of toe 1, and for the provisional sides, unzipped and moved those stitches to my now-empty second needle. Result - two toes dangling from my 2 circs ready to knit in the round.

This worked just fine, except I made one major mistake. Somehow, when I picked up the stitches way back in my provisional cast on for the second toe, I got them all twisted. Or not twisted, is probably more accurate. So when I began to knit in the round, I had this row of loops that wasn't really stitches, and as I knitted past them (blindly convinced that somehow that wonky looking mess would all work itself out at some point, if I Just. Kept. Knitting.), and then looked back at it, it was going to look like a row of lace across the toe of my sock.

Very pretty, if it were on both toes. But it wasn't, because I hadn't equally screwed up the first toe.

I'm still not sure how I did that, but regardless, I did one right, and one hideously wrong. And this had nothing to do with transferring them to 2 circs, because this happened way back at the beginning.

Since it occurred on my very first row of knitting, I couldn't just rip down and fix it - I had to rip it all out completely. After having gone through all that trouble, I decided the hell with it, for this pair I'm just going to go ahead and knit one at a time, like old times.

So ... I'm into the foot section of the first sock, one lone sock on my 2 circs, my first foray into 2 socks on 2 circs having failed miserably, but not because of the technique, but because of operator error in the first seconds of toe number two.

Ah well. At least I'm knitting A sock. And thrilled to be doing so. I'd forgotten how much I missed knitting socks.




In other news, my boyfriend came up with a neat costume for Halloween - all for about $1.00.




He knew, though, that since it was hard to see and impossible to drink through this mask, he'd probably be wearing it backwards most of the night ... so how to make that look nice, too?




Just call me Mary Magdalen.