It's a Barnum & Bailey World

A rainy cold weekend and a new sense of mission means my Paper Moon socks are finished -- including the re-knitting of the leg on the first sock. I really got into "the zone" on these lately -- and fitting with my modus operandi of letting projects languish and then suddenly knocking them out. A knitter's version of spring cleaning, perhaps. Which is also happening around here this spring break week. Believe me, it's needed.

You can't tell from the above picture, but I did re-knit the leg on the first sock. It would have just driven me nuts to know that these were "wrong," even if they looked fine they way they were. So I unraveled and unraveled and put the live stitches back on the dpns. Usually when I rip way back, I end up a row or two off, but I calculated it just right this time. And I was left with a giant wad of telephone cord yarn. (Sigh -- I just realized that "telephone cord" is starting to look like an anachronism.) In the past, I might just have wound it into a ball and started knitting, ignoring the fact that the kinks might make the knitting look wonky. ButI this time, I decided to be a bit more professional. Plus, I was worried that the kinks would make cables difficult to execute.

I wound the yarn around a box as I unravelled it. Using some scrap yarn, I tied off around the unravelled section in four places to keep it from tangling and I tied a stitch marker to the end so I could locate it later. Then I soaked the whole kinky mess for half an hour, leaving the rest of the sock on the edge of the basin. I squeezed it out, wrapped it in a towel and stepped on it, then draped it over a hanger with a slight weight and hung it in the shower to dry, again with the foot of the sock still attached. I had to get a bit creative, but it all worked. The next morning it was dry. Jeff did his husbandly duty of acting like a human swift while I wound it all up again, and then I was off to Saturday morning knitting.

Sunday evening, I had them finished. I washed and blocked the pair overnight and had my sock model pose for a picture on this glorious late winter day. They turned out beautifully. Jeff, who is not the biggest fan of wool socks, reports that these are quite comfy. That would probably be the silk. I'm glad I took the time to get these "right." And, because I'm a bit obsessive about these things, and because I'm hoping someone else out ther might be too, I can report that there are 392 cable twists in this pair of socks. And I'll have that number in my head each time I wear these. And I kind of like that.