Forward Footing

I have returned to my obsession with knitting socks. I’m not really sure why I haven’t been knitting socks, but I have only completed one solitary sock in the last several years. It was a beauty, but it remains alone, awaiting its partner.

This spring I began collecting sock yarn again, and ideas began to form themselves into plans, and it’s giving me a focus that isn’t at all making up for the loss of my dog, but at least I have something… Then, out of the blue, I won a set of exquisite Chiaogoo Twist Minis interchangeable needles, and I took that as a sign from the universe. When the needles arrived, I grabbed some turquoise blue yarn, and I chose a pattern from my collection of books, and I cast on. I did not care for the voice which told me to choose a simpler pattern, or at least choose a pattern with conventional sock construction. I wanted to knit the Kai Mei socks by Cookie A, and that’s what I did.

Having read the reviews for Cookie A’s Sock Innovation, I saw lots of comments about pattern errors, and this sent me on the hunt to find the errata file. The most up to date link for the corrections is here: Sock Innovation errata. I discovered that my copy of the book appears to be a more recent printing and I didn’t need the corrections.

The needles are even more exquisite in action than they are to behold, I have to say, and I am completely converted to the 9″ circular, having previously favoured dpns.

I won the needles after I wrote a wee letter to a magazine about being a “process knitter” – someone whose focus is on the process of knitting, rather than completing objects, and included a photo of a completed object that was one of their patterns. It was a silly moment. I was, at the time, sitting with my dog who had just been diagnosed with terminal bone cancer, and I had no control over that, but I could finish knitting and sewing up a cat. I don’t write to magazines, or put myself out there in that way, but I felt the need to do something less ordinary. It was weeks later, after my dog was gone, that I opened the magazine and found myself looking at my own photo of my own knitting. It was a lovely surprise. And the prize. Oh my.

When finished the first sock, I almost immediately cast on the second sock. There would be no second sock syndrome this time. I seem to have shifted a gear in my knitting life, and it feels good.

My knitting self is happy, and so are my feet.