Tuesday, December 16, 2008

I like my socks to match

So it will not be a surprise to anyone who knows me, that I go to great lengths to make my socks match.

When I am knitting with a self striping yarn, I pull the yarn out of two balls until they match and then start knitting. If I am using a 100 gram ball, I will knit two pair of socks because I know that the colours for the second pair are already lined up.

Friday night, as I was frantically starting another Christmas gift, I started to organise the yarn. After spreading half a ball of yarn all over the floor, I realised that one ball needed to be re-wound . The patterning was reversed. One ball started from the outside, and one from the inside. A minor delay and I was determined to make the socks match.

I knit all day Saturday, and all day Sunday. I took a break to knit a pair of mittens and continued on the socks.

Sunday evening, as I was working on the foot of the second sock, I realised that stripes on the socks weren't lining up.

All my great plans for perfectly matched socks were gone. There was a knot...in the first sock...The patterning had been changed.



I thought about ripping the first sock back but I will not.
I believe that the recipient of these socks will not mind that that they don't match. In fact, if his sister doesn't tell him, he will probably never know.

The next step? Wearing mismatched socks? Deliberately making only one sock of each pair? Only time will tell.

1 comment:

Tallguy said...

When I did my first self-patterning pair of socks, toe-up, there were 5 knits before I even got to the heel!! I was not impressed. As a result, the second sock (that also had to match) did not, so I had to cut the yarn in a couple of places, to make it shorter in those same spots! That almost put me off patterned yarn ever since. You know -- I haven't used any for a couple years as it is! hmm--