Need socks
People usually lose socks in the laundromat, don’t they? In Boston there used to be a laundromat called “The Found Sock” near our flat on Comm Ave. In all these years I have lost many a store-bought sock in this way, but never the handknit ones. Rather than subject them to this sorry fate as the poor machine-made ones, over this winter I lost them rather more spectacularly – I took them across the world and lost them there. I know I took several pairs home with me; on return I find that only one pair made it back, that too because it was on my feet during the journey. I have no idea where I left the others, and it is so maddening! I opened my drawer here to find only one pair, now sadly frayed and torn. (I really don’t care for Louet Gems sock yarn).
It is cold, wet and windy in the Bay area, and so I went to Article Pract and got me some Koigu, Austermann and Trekking, and immediately cast on. The idea is to knit these up super-fast, every waking moment, before the semester swallows me whole. The Austermann is a gorgeous, soft colour, much like the hesitant, early morning light I snapped the picture in, during a brief break in the rain. It’s apparently treated with some aloe vera that stays on even after forty washes. I don’t know what it will look like after forty washes, but right now it’s smooth and glides neatly over the bamboo needles.
I also got some bright Koigu, and a sober Trekking, which looks like it’s bristling next to the more fiery red Koigu! I love the mess the Koigu skeins make, even when wound up. They always do that, refusing to stay in place, feeling slippery and nubbly in your fingers. I know what you’re thinking: that is not lovely, that is downright annoying. But I cannot help it; Koigu is above criticism, as far as I am concerned. The sales clerk allowed me to go back into the storage area to find some shades, and as I rummaged through nearly a hundred skeins and innumerable hues, I felt this strange sense of joy – a Koigu high of sorts! Even the relatively dull oatmeal shades dance and shimmer in this yarn, somehow. It is possibly my favourite among all yarns of all time.
I had my first graduate class today, and after a couple of hours of historiography and methodology and epistemology and so on, I finally couldn’t help myself and asked one of the students if she had knit her gorgeous garter stitch hat herself. She hadn’t, but it was handknit. She showed it to me, and before I knew it half the class had crowded around as we tried to figure out its construction. It was knit in three parts, one of them sideways, resulting in vertical garter stripes. Half the students in the class, turns out, are avid knitters. I closed my eyes momentarily and imagined all of us knitting away in the next class as we took apart the assigned book for the week. I won’t do it, because it’s too distracting for the rest of the students. I was sorely tempted, though, because I do urgently need to finish some socks.
