How soon does school start?
Here is the start of my Canal du Midi sock for the Knitting on the Road-along. Yes, I am an entire sock behind now. It's just too many. I can't knit them all. I'm currently "in" the KOTR, Folk Socks, Six Socks, Vintage Socks and Evelyn Clark knitalongs. The EC one only sometimes features a sock but the current project was the Lupine Lace socks I finished a few days ago. So I don't know about you but I don't normally knit two pairs of socks a month. In fact, I'm doing pretty well to finish one pair of socks a month. So far I haven't knit a single sock from Vintage Socks, haven't knit anything from Six Socks since last year, have sat out on two patterns from Folk Socks and have stalled out on my Estonian Sock which is peering angrily at me right now from inside a plastic bag on my desk. You should have seen the look it gave me when I took its needle out to start the Canal du Midi socks.
I have a long love affair with this design. When I got back into knitting three years ago I did what I always do when something piques my interest--I checked out every freaking book in the Seattle and King County libraries on the topic. As a new knitter I thumbed through them all thinking, "That's too hard." "That's too hard." "That's way too hard." Knitting on the Road was one of those books. Socks were mysterious enough but the charts! Oh, the charts made me a little queasy. But I loved the tiny twists and turns on this sock. Then when I took my first class from Nancy she had a table set up with every sock from the book. I held the Canal du Midi and I loved it even more. At camp last year, I bought a skein of Satakeili, the actual yarn called for in the pattern, to make these socks. I joined the knitalong thinking that I would finally get to knit them. And now the time is here and I totally suck at it.
I spent an hour and a half on Monday morning alone in a coffee shop (precious alone time--how soon does school start?) and started on the socks. "It's got a chart," I thought. "Easy!" After all that time I looked at my sock--why don't I ever look while I'm knitting?--and it was totally fucking wrong. It was a mess. I felt so humiliated. By a sock. I made a quick stop at Purlygirls that night and ripped back to the ribbing. I started again. Hideous. Disgusting. Wrong. What was my problem? Tuesday I pull Montse Stanley off the shelf and look at her twisted stitch instructions. Ohhhhh. I get it. I knitted on. It looks better now. I still have a little nagging doubt that something is not quite right with my right twists and it's made me question whether I knit Conwy correctly since they have the same left and right twist in them. I also jump ahead a row every single time I get to the center twist. I've had to rip back several rows a few times to fix this already. The Satakeili feels very nice and shows off the stitches very well. It is a bitch to rip out. And it splits. Like the devil. So much for the socks of my dreams. But I will tame these bastards if it's the last thing I do.
How soon does school start?
