Adventures of a Desi KnitterKnitting (and now sewing!) keeps an Indian academic sane in the States. Almost.

Plain vanilla, with a pinch of nutmeg

§ June 2nd, 2010 § Filed under Screw ups, Socks, Travel § 3 Comments

You’d have thought that a caffeine shot would have energised my yarn into knitting itself speedily into fabric, but apparently caffeine doesn’t have the same effects on everyone. It took way longer for the Tosh Sock skein in ‘Nutmeg’ to turn into a wearable pair, and despite great initial ambition and effort, they eventually managed to achieve only a plain vanilla stockinette grade. (At least the coffee stains don’t show!)

I knit exclusively on this pair for much of April and May, a good part of the latter month on a glorious holiday to Mexico, recovering from a horridly busy semester. Apart from the Knotty-knice pattern I first tried for it, which ended up too loose on the foot and a pain with all those twisted stitches, I also tried a pretty cabled cuff and various other things. Alas, the photographs of those iterations (imagine my nutmeg cable climbing up the pyramid at Teotihuacan) and of the trip in general, are now with the person who found my camera on the bus after I kindly, thoughtfully, left it there and traipsed off. Long, winding, bus journeys through mountains apparently don’t just make me nauseated, they also make me lose my brains and valuable things.

SO, I had a fantastic and gorgeous time in Mexico; I just don’t have the pics to show for it. The spouse mounted a very spirited critique of photographic reproduction as a poor and illegitimate approximation of reality to cheer me up, for which I was very grateful at the time, quelling all inner wails about ‘but how will I blog about it?’ Now, with some distance, I too am philosophical about the ephemerality of possession, of material goods, of memory, but boy would it have been nice to share some of the pics with you!

In any event, none of the patterns I tried on these toe-ups were satisfactory either because they were too long, or too tight, or whatever, and I finally fell back on stockinette. But then I got obsessed with just using up all the yarn (a substantial 390 yards in this skein!) to see how long the socks would get. I increased 2 stitches along the calf every ten rows 8 times. (60 + 2 st every 10th row, 8 times = 76 st total at cuff).

Then I tried them on and realised that socks look longer when off, than when on your leg. I was confident the cuffs would kiss my kneecaps, but they barely managed the point in the calf where I was sure they would slide right down, so I added some scrap sock yarn I had to get them past that hump. Now they don’t slide down, exactly, but merely threaten to. If they do slip with some stretch and use, I might add more lines with another yarn to the cuff later. Still, it felt really good to knit right to the end. I have just a few yards of the Tosh Sock left, which does feel good.

They look like soccer socks, no? I looked at all the World Cup team colours, though, and these colours seem to fall right between Brazil and Spain. Actually, they look like the colours of another, magical team – a variation on Gryffindor’s quidditch socks.