About two weeks before Christmas I had a thought. It went something like this.
Sean didn’t get socks for his birthday (in November). Sean isn’t getting socks (or anything knitted at all) for Christmas. Oh shit. How quickly can I rectify this?
Pretty damn quickly once I put my mind to it, actually! I decided I had to knit something thick and quick and a pair of 8ply socks seemed to most obvious path to happiness in this instance. When I announced the idea to RoseRed, at which point I was considering socks made out of Jet, which is 10ply alpaca, she said surely they’d be too hot to wear.
Surely not. This is Canberra after all, where in winter it gets a whole lot colder than it does in Sydney but obviously not as cold as say, Canada. Nonetheless, my husband lives in heavy weight explorer socks for most of winter so a pair of 8ply socks, even if they ended up just being worn around the house or as bed socks, was a sure fire way to make certain he got something knitted for Christmas.
And here they are.
Lovely thick (and oh so fast) winter weight socks made from Cleckheaton Country. I’d love to say I had something in the stash to whip these up but sadly I didn’t. I’d hoped. Alas I had to buy the yarn one lunch time from Lincraft.
To spruce up the fairly pedestrian grey, I went with a red houndstooth band around the leg and finished it of with the patented RoseRed Red Toe, a detail seen here and here. I’m going to have to learn to do fair isle a little more loosely because these are hard to get over his heels. Still, the socks are kind of big so the tight band helps hold them up a bit!
And do you know how fast I knit these? Basically in two days. I know. I even surprised myself. The last toe was done a few days later but 95% of this pair was done by the two day mark. I had the benefit of a weekend bus trip to Sydney though – three hours there, three hours back plus a full weekend of knitting in between, almost entirely uninterrupted. I’m not sure it would have happened that quickly otherwise.
Needless to say, he was very happy to receive them on Christmas morning.
And now, since I’m still settling into the new blog and since everyone has been so nice to come and follow me here, I thought I’d kick off the new year with a contest. I can’t honestly say what the prizes are yet but I’m going to have a few and I hope they will be good. So all you need to do is leave a comment between now and midnight Sunday 10th January (midnight wherever you are) and I’ll draw names later next week!
Bells
