Just a shameless LAM
Socks. I made socks.
For the longest time I'd had the idea that socks were hard -- I knew people knitted them, but I thought they must surely be difficult or at least in some way very tricky. (The odd thing is that I've heard other knitters say the same thing about fairly simple knitting techniques: "Oh, it's a lovely pattern, but I couldn't possibly do it -- it has cables! I don't know how to do cables!")
Finally I sat down with a ball of worsted weight yarn in a shade of purple that looked nice in the store -- acrylic yarn, which your yarn-snob correspondent normally would not touch -- five double-pointed needles and a copy of Ann Budd's Getting Started Knitting Socks, and I started casting on.
And I knitted, and I followed the instructions. And I knitted, and counted stitches, and counted rounds, and flipped pages in the book. And I knitted, and tinked, and knitted again, and swore and clicked my row-counter, and kept finding the wrong number of stitches on my needles, and had to tink back and knit again, and I stared in wonder as the heel shaping produced something actually shaped like a heel, and I did the toe shaping absolutely perfectly until I reached the very tip where I expended a very great many very bad words indeed on Kitchner stitch which I know there's no devil but if there was he invented it.
Then I started over again, and did the whole thing a second time.
And now I have socks. They are fat and ugly and clumsy and far too big around, they're in an appalling color, but my housemate can wear them around the house and they will keep her feet warm.
Look:
Real socks. Which I made. Myself.
Next: one of those extremely cool self-patterning yarns. Schachenmyer Regia, perhaps, or Plymouth Sockotta.
For the longest time I'd had the idea that socks were hard -- I knew people knitted them, but I thought they must surely be difficult or at least in some way very tricky. (The odd thing is that I've heard other knitters say the same thing about fairly simple knitting techniques: "Oh, it's a lovely pattern, but I couldn't possibly do it -- it has cables! I don't know how to do cables!")
Finally I sat down with a ball of worsted weight yarn in a shade of purple that looked nice in the store -- acrylic yarn, which your yarn-snob correspondent normally would not touch -- five double-pointed needles and a copy of Ann Budd's Getting Started Knitting Socks, and I started casting on.
And I knitted, and I followed the instructions. And I knitted, and counted stitches, and counted rounds, and flipped pages in the book. And I knitted, and tinked, and knitted again, and swore and clicked my row-counter, and kept finding the wrong number of stitches on my needles, and had to tink back and knit again, and I stared in wonder as the heel shaping produced something actually shaped like a heel, and I did the toe shaping absolutely perfectly until I reached the very tip where I expended a very great many very bad words indeed on Kitchner stitch which I know there's no devil but if there was he invented it.
Then I started over again, and did the whole thing a second time.
And now I have socks. They are fat and ugly and clumsy and far too big around, they're in an appalling color, but my housemate can wear them around the house and they will keep her feet warm.
Look:
Real socks. Which I made. Myself.
Next: one of those extremely cool self-patterning yarns. Schachenmyer Regia, perhaps, or Plymouth Sockotta.