FO: Manly Socks

I’d say it was good to be back, but I was very unwilling to come away from the tiny cottage in Devon we’ve been hiding in for the past week. This coming week is far too busy, with hospital and midwife appointments and me being prodded and poked and generally not having much fun. I’d rather be having another cream tea (not a photo of the one I had while away, but you get the idea of the gluttony that’s been going on!) or go up on Dartmoor and look at the views and enjoy the peace and quiet.

Anyway, as there’s little I can do about being a medical specimen rather than eating clotted cream, I may as well get back to my knitting. I didn’t get much done while I was away. I have started a couple of new projects which I will share later, but the Tomten Jacket is still without a second sleeve, which I feel bad about because I deliberately ordered the yarn before I went away so that I could finish it on holiday and then just find a zip. Oh well, I shall distract you all with a photo of some manly feet instead.

Pattern: Sock-shaped
Yarn: Zitron Trekking XXL, 1 x 100g ball in shade: #147
Needles: 2.25mm Susan Bates Silvalume

I finished MrB’s manly socks just before we went away, and the first chance for a photo opportunity was when he wore them for the first time on holiday. They’re just the basic plain sock recipe from the free Regia booklet that I don’t even look at now: as long as I note down how many rows I knit for the heel flap and the stitches worked for the heel turn, the numbers are stuck in my head. At least I though they were…

I found the booklet at the weekend because I have had a sock request from my sister to knit a pair for my new brother-in-law and as he has smaller feet than MrB (which makes me happy in a not-having-to-knit-ultra-long-feet sort of way) I needed to check what length they needed to be. Turns out I had mis-remembered the length before the the toe for the largest size and had been short-changing MrB a whole half centimetre (about 0.2 inches) for years. Seeing as it doesn’t seem to have affected him in any way, I’m just going to carry on. Just don’t tell him.

Also, since the last time I used them (which according to my finished project page, could be as long ago as May 2008!), I have lost one of the 2.25mm Silvalume needles somewhere. I can knit small socks on 4 dpns, but it was tough going with large numbers of stitches. I used a 2.5mm bamboo needle as a stop-gap, but I hate the awkwardness of having a different texture interrupting the flow. So I’ve ordered a set of KnitPicks (or KnitPro or whatever they are currently called over here) metal needles from eBay to see if they’ll do as a substitute, or else it means expensive postage costs to get another set of needles. And I’d probably pay them, too. I’d do much stranger things just to get needles that I love to use.