My first ever finished sock!

This is my first ever finished sock!


And I was so exited to have finally finished one that I immediatly cast on for the second. I have read a lot of second sock syndrome tales in the knitting blog world and feel it is important to maintain momentum at this stage. Normally, I have suffered from first sock syndrome, I once turned a heel on a pair of very short top down socks, but I never got anywhere near finishing one. So this, I feel, is me coming out and being presented to the knitting society at my debutante ball!

I made the socks toe up. I like the concept of knitting until one runs out of wool. This made them quite long, but that was sort of hoped for; I truly didn't have a clue how much wool there was in a skein and how much sock it would make.


But as you can see they are well above calf length, but not quite knee high. Being made of sort of worsted weight wool, with 3.75mm needles (a lot smaller than the suggested 4.5's, but I am intending on getting a fair amount of wear here and tighter normally lasts longer)


Most likely I am going to wear these as sort of sock slippers for lounging round the house. As you can see from the state of the unsanded and wood worm riddled floorboards in my sitting room this is going to give the poor things a certain amount of heavy wear. So much that I am seriously considering sewing some sort of either leather or something else hard wearing to the soles as protection. Kind of a more colourful and cheerful version of those nepali sock slipper things my mum wore in the days when I was young.


As you can see my second ball of wool is behaving rather differently to the first. I don't mind this at all, and the exitement of seeing what is going to happen to the pattern on the next repeat is great. Plus if I am going to get all into these handpainted skeins of pure luxury then it is just something you have to love.

But the whole sock knitting thing is mostly down to my recent discovery of the magic loop method of knitting in a circle. How great it is and how much easier is it to control than all those pointy and spikey dpn's? (Lots!) How did I not know about it until a few weeks ago? (Ignorance and not enough blog reading)

So, sock knitters of the world - I owe you all an apology. I thought you were all mad, and I am starting to have my suspicions that you were right all along. I still think I am going to knit jumpers, but the odd pair might be slipping into the equation every so often, and it gives me the perfect excuse to buy some lovely colourful and fantastic wool.