i’m making a mess!

i bet you’re really surprised, huh? (ok, don’t tell me if you are; just let me go on thinking that only some of you might be . . .)

thank you everyone for all the sweet compliments on the rococo socks. wow, you really DO like your special sock patterns! and i enjoyed knitting these quite a bit.
i’m sure there will be more soon—i have lots of sock ideas, and apparently, i need the motivation of a fun pattern to wile away the cuff-and-foot hours (more on that later).

the pre-holiday season gives me a chance to explore small projects with relish, to try new stitches and configurations in limited and structured ways, and apply them to intended gifts to make individual creations that i hope reflect to each person how i feel about them, or reveal something i see in them.

however.

exploring small projects with enthusiasm usually means that all sorts of little piles form all over the place. little bit of this and that trail across nearly every surface. single items that will eventually be part of a pair abound, but at this point, are strewn will-nilly and piled together into incoherent “families”

my coffee table looks like a bomb went off on top of it

seriously, it has looked this way for the last two weeks, even when someone is stopping by. i don’t even see it. i have no idea what that lime-green cashmere yarn is doing out, even; i’m sure i thought i’d get to make myself some mitts with it at some point last week.

the gift pile is growing, but where to store it?

under the tree seems safe enough, but i know i’ll have to move it at some point if, indeed, the place is to be vacuumed before christmas.

bags of supplies have piled up near my knitting chair in one spot, and stitch books are piled near another knitting chair upstairs. it’s a good thing i live with someone else, or this situation might go completely unnoticed.

because truthfully, if it didn’t collect dust, and get embarrassingly messy, i think i could be the type of person to sink into the kind of knitting clutter that is claustrophobic, disorganized, and signals a downward spiral into some mental state that only be bad.

i’m also discovering why i am not a Sock Knitter, with capitals. i mean, sure i make socks—lots of them, it’s true. but i do not make a quest of it. it cannot be the only thing i do, or even the most important thing i do for very long. why?

because i see that, as an exclusive path, i find it somewhat boring once i hit the hard times (sorry Sock Knitters—believe me, i bow to your journey; i’m just saying, it isn’t my main gig). i need entertainment for sock knitting to be interesting, and really, that is the thing that disqualifies me from membership.

as soon as i finished the rococo socks, and found myself with just the last two plain pairs to complete, a kind of boredom with them has settled in. not the kind to make me stop working on them; after all, they are gifts and need to be completed.

no, i mean the kind of boredom in which i find that focusing on the sock too much while i’m working on it will put me to sleep. i need to think about something else while i work—i need to think about the horizon. the after christmas horizon.

after christmas i will work on a shawl—i have several great schemes for shawls which have been cooking away since the fall. i can’t wait to get to them. plus, i have the starlight evening wrap which is about one-third done and ready for the first splashy end panel.

and then there are the sweaters. my little red ball of briar rose yarn sits among the mess patiently while i work. i gaze at it every so often, and iin lieu of swatching with it (no time for that right now), i try to mentally conjure a cable combination from it which will bring my little red cardigan to life. my cabled pullover sits half-finished and wails loudly for my attentions, but i am being good.

i am knitting gift socks, but really, i am putting plenty of thought into all the suggestions the wonderful Sock Knitters sent me about making myself better-fitting socks. (this was another clue that i really am a Sock Knitting poséur—i would have just kept knitting the same dumb socks, and cursing them forever, if so many people had not sent me such great suggestions, most of them simple. and from sheer laziness too—i just can’t be bothered to get up in the middle of knitting to look up in a book what my problem might be.) fortunately, i gleaned lots of good advice from reading everyone’s input that i think will improve my own fit greatly.

i even snuck the first finished sock for the mail carrier onto my foot for a tryout of the slip-stitch heel. it feels great, as does the shaping and the tighter fabric (not a tighter sock, but a tighter fabric). i think i will definitely make a few pair with this heel and see how it works. and the heel flap will be deeper, too. i wonder what my beef WAS with this heel (i have a sneaking suspicion that i was just bored with it)?

and we found a great new name for the austermann step socks! leigh wrote in that they reminded her of neapolitan ice cream, and i agreed, but then i thought, no! not neapolitan—

spumoni.
they look just like it, and we used to eat spumoni on christmas most years when i was a kid. my grandparents would buy it as a treat for us, but i think they liked it even more than we did. so, spumoni socks they are!

well, i better get back to it; i REALLY need to finish those two pair of socks tonight, so i can start the kid’s gifts. i did some ferreting about in the stash and came up with several bagfuls of yarn and ideas. show you tomorrow.