A Tale of Two Socks

Knitting a pair of socks isn’t really that exciting, but this pair seem to have been around the world and back.

Before we headed off on our most recent trip I had planned to just take my slow stitching pouch to work on, but at the last minute, decided that I needed something a bit more portable.  Being winter, there seems to be a lot of socks being knitted and I decided to join the trend.

Being me, I decided to use what I have to hand and that includes a large collection of sock wool scraps, despite the fact that I had only ever knitted one pair of socks.  You see, back in 2019, we went to the local swap meet and a lady was destashing a lot of wool.  I bought some Bendigo yarn, a few skeins of sock wool, some of which has been used for scarves, and a large bag of scraps.  I seem to be drawn to scraps.

Anyway, I decided to knit some scrappy socks and pulled out what I thought would work together and took them away with us, together with my digital scales so that I could try to get the two socks the same, so I supposed the plan was for controlled scrappy.  This is just a small selection of the scraps.

I made a start while we were at the RSL Club in Trangie to watch the State of Origin Football.

The next day I made a little more progress while sitting in the sun at Byrock.

I continued to do a little each day as we travelled along and by the time we had reached Tambo I had turned the heel and was working on the foot.  My initial plan was to have uneven stripes, depending on the amount of wool I had, but one large scrap was actually self striping, so that made things easy.  It goes from the light blue near the top of the sock to the tealy green, below the peachy/ochre colour down near the heel. I found that the cup holder in my camp chair worked beautifully as a yarn bowl.

I had knitted up to the stage of working on the toe when I received the phone call that had me flying home.  A quick trip to Spotty had me buy an aeroplane safe thread cutter, but I was unsure if I would be allowed to take my knitting needles on the plane.  To my relief I was.  Therefore, while sitting at Gladstone Airport I transferred the first sock onto the DPN needles to free up my little circular needle to start on the second sock, as that would take much less brain power to work on.

As you can see, I didn’t make a great deal of progress, as this was taken on the train travelling from Sydney to Bathurst.  I suppose I was a bit too distracted to knit.

I finished off the toe of the first sock once I returned home.  

Back home, I finished the leg section of the second sock and then put them aside for a little while when it came to knitting the heel flap.  Once again, too much brain power needed at the time.

Gradually, I knitted a bit here and there and finally finished them off today.  They are far from perfect, but they will keep my tootsies nice and toasty.

By the way, do you like my cute little stitch marker?  I found a packet of four of them in a op shop last year for 50c.  They looked like they must have been a freebie on the front of a magazine.  Anyway, I had to use one when I knitted some socks.

Oh, and I still have this much leftover from the socks……and that was just the little bit I pulled out for them.  I have enough to make many pairs of scrappy socks……or maybe scrappy something else.  Time will tell.

Now to find something else to work on….I have plenty of options.