An FO!

You may be saying to yourself, "Socks? So what's the big deal about finishing a pair of socks?" I think of these as the "ball and chain" socks. Finally, I am free. Last fall I promised myself and you, my dear devoted reader, that I would not knit anything else until I finished the second of a pair of socks. Ahem. I seem to have gotten a little...sidetracked. In any case, better late than never! It was not a simple as it may appear. I wandered so far from these socks that when I finally cast on for the second, I had forgotten how many stitches it was, then, MADE THE WHOLE SECOND SOCK FOUR STITCHES SMALLER THAN THE FIRST. Now these babies are snug, so that second one barely made it over my big toe. Why I didn't see it on the needles, I will never know. What do you call that anyway? I know I'm not the only one -- that weird knitting blindness that causes two socks to come out so wildly mismatched even though they look identical when you hold them up to each other? Same thing with sleeves. And cardigan sides. Do you know how many times I mis-eyeballed before I finally got with the program and started counting? In the case of this lame sock, I was SO CONFIDENT about the number of stitches, that I ONLY counted rows! It then took TWO MORE TRIES. One was about four inches into it when I realized I couldn't live with the different shape of the toe, then I started over AGAIN and was about FIVE inches into it. The whole time I was knitting it, I was saying to myself like a little mantra, "It's just the stinkin' toe, it doesn't have to match perfectly, it's just the stinkin toe, it doesn't have to match perfectly." At the fifth inch, about 1 am on a weeknight, stopped, pulled the needles from the stitches and started ripping. As I did, I'm quite sure I must have screamed it out aloud, "IT MATTERS! IT MATTERS! THE TOES MUST MATCH!!!" So, you see, me and these socks, we' been around the block a few times.

The yarn is Artyarns Ultramerino 4, which I liked so much, I got this:

I was flipping through my Barbara Walker 2 and found a cool stitch called "seaweed." In honor of the cruise and the color of this yarn, I thought I'd try my hand at incorporating this stitch into the socks. I googled it to see if it already existed and, apparently it once did, but seems to have been removed. So I guess I've got to try it on my own.