Curse Of The Knitting Heel

Tuesday night I finally finished the cuff on one sock. It came to 4½”, which is the same length as those blue, green, and yellow knitted socks my mother gave me last Christmas. I’m really pleased with how the stripes came out with this yarn. I had expected something more erratic when I picked up the balls.

I started on the heal and, of course, my troubles have started anew. I got 3 rows in and discovered I had lost a stitch. So I backed out a row — is there a knitting term for that? Frogging? The second heal row was also a stitch short and I couldn’t figure out where it had lost the stitch so I pulled out that row too. Back down to the first row of the heal which was supposed to be *s1 k1* across 28 stitches, there were 28 stitches, but upon close investigation, I had skipped some k1’s in there. So, I frogged some more stitches and reworked the row, but when I got to the end, it looked just as bad or worse, and it’s really not a difficult pattern! I tried to fix it one more time without positive result and then put it away and went sulkily to bed.

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Knitting Socks Attempt #5,000,002

Well, it’s taken me a week of try-and-try again, but I think I may have finally figured out knitting in the round. I’m currently working with #3 bamboo circular needles 29″ long. I cast on 56st and I’ve been doing a K2 P2 rib. I’m planning on a 6in leg.

When I was working with my #2 Addi’s, they were a shorter length and kind of hung in the way. So I bought the 29″ circulars thinking they would hang longer and out of my way while I was working the active needles. For some reason, the bamboo needle’s cords are like coils. They twist everywhere and all in my face and in my way and everything. I’ve been laying them flat at night under 12-packs of sodas but this doesn’t appear to help for longer than 30 seconds. I read somewhere to run them under hot water to straighten them out. That too only helped for 30 seconds. If anyone knows how to straighten out the cord of a coiled circular needle, I’m willing to try suggestions.

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Knitting Socks Is The Tool Of The Devil

Thanks to the fact that I have been feeling quite well both physically and mentally for the last few weeks, I have begun engaging in activities that are supposed to be fun and bring me enjoyment. You know, like knitting.

Knitting socks is clearly an activity created by the Devil to drive people insane.

I’ve started about a hundred pairs of socks and have yet to finish even the cuff of a single one. I was actually doing pretty well on one, which was going to be a pair of baby socks for a friend who’s baby was born last summer — missed that deadline. However, I made the mistake of putting it down for a while and coming back to it and when I restarted I could never get my new work to match up with the old ribbing work. I mean, I was still doing K2 P2 and in the same places but it didn’t look the same and it didn’t even look inside out. It just looked garbled.

So, I’ve put that aside for now. I’ve cast on a pair of #3 bamboo circular needles to start on the basic woman’s medium sock at the beginning of Socks Soar on Two Circular Needles by Cat Bordhi. I’ve only done one row so far. It’s taken me about 8 hours to get that far because I’ve started, pulled it out and restarted about 5 or six times already. At least once I thought the stitches were way too tight. Once nothing looked right. The rest of the time, my counting has gotten really screwed up in such a way that I just didn’t know how to fix it — in fact, once the join came undone two rows in and I have no idea how that happened but the count was also off.

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The First 2 Inches

Well, I’ve had some setbacks. Wednesday night I had about an inch cuff but I realized that 1/2 of the inch was done one way and the other half another or rather it seemed like all of a sudden I’d started knitting where I’d purled and purling where I’d knitted. I considered just pulling out the second 1/2 inch but really the second 1/2 inch looked far better than the first because, of course, I’d finally got the hang of things. The first half looked like someone trying to learn how to knit socks, which was what it was. So I pulled the whole thing out and started over again on Thursday.

I’ve now finished about 2 inches on the cuff. The pattern calls for 4-1/2 for the cuff before all of the terrifying roundy-bits start. I didn’t have a lot of knitting time over the weekend because of the cleaning and shopping sprees. However, I feel I’ve come along way and I think it looks quite nice, much better than it did when I was starting. I’m quite pleased. I definitely love using the circular needles; I can’t imagine how anyone uses four or five double-pointed needles.

Sock Knitting: Take II

Well, I decided that I didn’t like the yarn I was using when I started trying to (learn to) knit the baby socks on Sunday; it just wasn’t dainty enough, in my opinion, for a premie newborn little girl. As the nice lady at Yarn Central said, “You have to love the yarn.” So, I bought this ball of fine really really soft yarn that alternates between pink, blue, green, and purple pastels.

I restarted on Monday night. Of course, that took two tries. I did some weird miscount in the join and when I got around after the first row, I couldn’t figure out what had happened so I restarted.

Then last night I realized that somewhere somehow I had started working with the dangling tail rather than the strand going to the ball and I had to pull out about 8 stitches and that’s always a bad thing for me.

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The Pursuit of Sock Knitting

I spent most of the day watching DVDs and T.V. and trying to learn how to knit socks — in particular baby socks.

I had purchased a learn to knit socks kit from the internet with 5 double-pointed #2 needles, yarn, and instructions. I had read through the instructions the other night and reread them this morning and I thought that the first part — the casting on, the cuff, and the ankle — sounded fairly straightforward and easy.

That is until I tried to do it.

Casting on is extremely easy, unless of course you have bad fibromyalgia and your hands don’t want to work. Of course, my first thought was that I only had to do Casting on once…silly me.

I ended up having to Cast on about 20 different times today. I was fine after the casting on, I thought, until I had to do the k2tog (knit 2 together), which was a new knitting “stitch” or whatever you want to call it, for me.

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