Argyles Complete

This morning, I completed the second of the pair of Argyle socks. I’ve been working on this pair for six long weeks, and I pretty much did 3/4 of the work in the past four days. So any of my projects seem to end up that way – at some point I reach a “this is it” moment and all I want to do is just get it over with.

That makes it sound like I wasn’t pleased with this project. Overall, I was. But I found I was dependent on the pattern instructions throughout the whole process – constantly consulting them wore me down. Then there was the bobbin issue. For the cuff, this  involved 9 separate live knitting yarns to keep up with. Also exhausting. The gray background color needed to be carried through the whole sock, so it wasn’t in bobbins. I tried to use rubber bands to manage them, but it seemed like every time I picked this project, I spent the first half hour just untangling everything.

On the other hand, it was kind of mathematically soothing to watch the lines and angles growing and shrinking, moving back and forth across the fabric. Overall, argyle is not that complicated a concept – but you do have to pay attention. There were several times I had to tink back a row or tow after finding a mistake. And I could never quite figure out how to avoid holes at the tops and bottoms of the colored diamonds where typically several new strands of yarn were introduced. I just decided to handle it while weaving in the ends, which I was more or less able to do. These are still a bit snug. I’m going to block them later – but I’ve got months and months to go before I’ll actually want to wear these.

For now, I’m pleased that they’re finished, mostly happy with the result, and ready to tackle some more projects. Some of my knitting friends have been laughing about pregnancy being contagious since there were so many fecund friends and relatives were making announcements about soon-to-arrive bundles of joy. And then Jeff’s mom called with news about his cousin. Time to peruse the patterns…