Defending Your Sock Knitting Life
Monica: Yesterday Lynette told me that one of our coworkers mentioned this knitting blog she read where these two knitters just seemed to knit socks exclusively. Our coworker was pretty disgusted with the bloggers whose blog name was “passionknit”. Lynette remained very calm when she said, “Are you talking about me and Monica?” because Lynette is a nice person. I don’t think I would’ve been as nice. I would’ve used my needles in a not-so-nice way.
I’m not necessarily defending my sock knitting but educating people about my sock knitting addiction. I’ve been knitting for about 25 years and didn’t start to knit socks until 5 years ago. I would only knit 1 or 2 occasionally a year but after we moved to southern California and I pretty much had enough sweaters to last me several lifetimes I switched to socks. Then this whole new world (cue Disney song here–warning–this link plays the song so if you don’t want it playing over and over in your head like it did for me don’t click on it) opened up for me. I used to be skeptical of the whole sock knitting thing but once I started I couldn’t stop. So here are some reasons I came up with on why I knit lots of socks:
- I LOVE sock yarn. I have enough yarn for 56 pairs of socks
- Sock yarn is relatively cheap.
- Sock yarn comes in many beautiful colors.
- You don’t need a lot of yarn to knit a pair of socks. (I said a pair…don’t look at #1 above)
- I love wearing hand knit socks.
- They are quick to knit–almost instant gratification projects.
- Last year I knit 23 pairs of socks.
- Not all were for me…probably about 10 pairs were gifts. Socks make great gifts.
- I wore out 7 pairs of socks. I don’t mind wearing them out because that just means that I get to knit more.
- Sock projects are very portable.
- It’s easy for me to remember where I was when I stopped knitting the sock so that I can quickly start knitting again.
- I love sock construction. My favorite part is the heel/gusset part of a top down sock.
- I tend to be more adventurous with sock knitting. Last year I was determined to knit toe-up socks and used this awesome Turkish cast-on tutorial. (Thank you FluffyKnitterDeb) That’s the only way I cast on for toe-ups.
- I was successful at knitting short-row heels without holes. It took a lot of practice at pulling the yarn tight so that there would not be any holes.
- I’ve knit so many different patterns with socks that I normally don’t with knitting sweaters. I usually knit a lot of stockinette stitch sweaters because those are more wearable for me.
- Speaking of sweaters, I can get my multi-colored, variegated yarn fix by knitting socks since I tend to knit and wear one-colored sweaters.
- I never swatch for socks…I can usually tell by the yarn what needle size to use and what pattern should work depending on the number of stitches that the pattern uses.
So there will continue to be lots of sock knitting going on here and I’m not ashamed of any of it.
