We interrupt this shawl-slog to bring you...socks!

ARE YOU MY HUSBAND? THEN SOD OFF! Thanks and lots of love and kisses. Mwah.

I continue to work away on the third iteration of my shawl's ruffle, but I decided to give myself a good zing of feeling productive and finish some socks I've been working on.

The first pair is for my dad - he's getting two pairs of socks for Christmas, and this is the second pair. I'd already finished the knitting of both socks a few weeks back, but had two concerns. The first was that I suspected I'd made the feet too long, and the second was a concern that the cabling around the ankles would make them too snug. My husband is extremely close to my dad in both foot length and ankle/calf girth, so I wanted him to try them on and see. However, invariably, all the times I remembered to ask him to try on the socks were right after he'd finished doing something sweaty, like mowing the lawn or unloading skids at work, that sort of thing. And of course it's far less icky for my dad if the socks he's gifted with haven't been imbued with sweat from another person, KWIM?

Anyway, I finally managed to ask DH to try the socks on very shortly after he'd showered, and the verdict was that they were just the teensiest bit long in the foot, and snug-but-still-acceptable at the ankle.

The snug-but-acceptable verdict was particularly relieving, because it meant I didn't have to rip back the entire leg on both socks and redo them more loosely.

The a-bit-long-in-the-foot verdict was a bit annoying, but not horribly so. It meant that I had to redo the toes. Not a huge deal. See, I know from experience that my dad's feet are about a quarter-inch shorter than my husband's, and that if socks are just a touch too snug on my husband, they'll be a perfect fit for my dad.

So yesterday I redid both toes and sewed in all the (vast multitude of) ends, and by the end of the night, I had completed socks!

And now we get to the part where my husband needed to go away for.

Is he gone?

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.
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Okay.

Over two years ago, I started making Aragorn socks, a design by Janneke Maat. I made them in the largest size because I was thinking they'd be for DH. These socks are drop-dead gorgeous, with Bavarian-style twisted cables all done up to look like something elven from the Lord of the Rings universe. Fancy and fiddly, yes, which DH doesn't really go for, but elvishly so, thus I thought it would be well-received (he's a big Tolkein fan), especially since I made it in blue (read: a "manly" colour). Hey, it doesn't get more masculine than Aragorn, amirite?

For some reason, I put them aside after finishing the heel on the first sock (they're top-down). But this month I finally picked the socks back up again, thinking that maybe they could be DH's Christmas present this year. And guess what:

I think they look fabulous. Marvellous design. Gorgeous result.

The problem, I must warn anyone who's thinking of knitting them, are the instructions themselves. Now, a great many allowances must be made for the fact that the designer's native language is not English. As well, this is a free pattern, so I understand that there is very little complaining one can legitimately do about a freebie. However, all this aside, there is one big problem which really got my frustration-o-meter going. These socks are quite unique in that there is a single gusset at the top of the instep, as opposed to on the sides of the foot near the heel. So once you get to the bottom of the leg, you start increasing at the centre of the instep for this gusset. This gusset section begins with its own header, and the instructions talk in detail about what you're supposed to do all through the increasing for the gusset, and then the instructions for the gusset end. Full stop. There is then a completely new header (and all the headers are in a fancy Quenya-esque font, so there's no mistaking them for regular text) called "Faux Heel". And this new set of instructions begins, "At the same time..."

:::insert temper tantrum here:::

But if you set the re-doing of the entire gusset section aside (probably twice, since I imagine I got caught by it on the first sock, too, even though it was so long ago now that I can't remember), this was a lovely project, as you can clearly see. I'm not sure if I'll make anything else knitted for my husband for Christmas, but if I don't, that means I have three gifts done already (including my mom's shawl and my dad's two pairs of socks).

Next up: Owlie Socks! You really should follow that link to see what they look like - aren't they amazing?!? I'm going to make them in white with yellow (bead) eyes for DD1 and call them Hedwig socks. :) They're top-down, so my plan is to knit the leg, heel, and some foot for each sock, and then wait until closer to Christmas (when she will have grown more) to finish off the feet.

Oh look, a bunny

Out of the five projects I profiled in my last blog entry, I've worked on only one of them since...and then temporarily shelved it. (It was the semi-secret project. The gauge turned out to be completely off. I'm going to have to rip it alllll back and redo my calculations from square one, which makes me quail, not because of the recharting - although that's going to be annoying - but because it is ridiculously hard to frog that Muppet pelt yarn I showed you.)

Instead, I got completely distracted by Janneke Maat's "Aragorn" sock pattern. I started it because I realised on Monday last week that perhaps I should be concerning myself with ensuring that my husband had a good present for our tenth wedding anniversary on the Thursday, and I briefly had delusions that I could do a pair of intricately cabled socks for him in that space of time. (Aren't I funny?) I got over that pretty quickly, but not before I had cast on for the first sock, and, since I took the day off for said anniversary, got to spend some time on it:

Isn't it fantastic? It looks like it just fell off of the needles at Rivendell, doesn't it? I adore it. The cast-on instructions in the English have a few problems with them, but after spending some time with the original Dutch instructions, Google Translate, and this helpful article from Knitty covering the tubular cast-on, I figured it out. For anyone who's interested, my findings are as follows:

1. The instructions state very clearly that you're supposed to cast on using the tubular method, but although you're given round-by-round instructions for the cast-on, at no point are you told when you're supposed to grab the purl bumps from the area where the provisional cast-on is. So I extrapolated that the grabs/pickups are really the "yo"s in "Rnd 1" of the cast-on.
   
   
2. There's some extraneous Dutch in "Rnd 4". Having looked at the actual Dutch instructions, I can definitely say that this Dutch bit in the English an accidental duplication, so don't translate it, don't worry about it...just IGNORE it.
   
   
3. The "purl the yarn over" in "Rnd 4" should actually read just "P1" (again, this is from having checked the original Dutch).

Other than that, though, I've found the pattern pretty darn clear. And I certainly love the result.

Naturally, though, this didn't end up being the anniversary present. (Birthday present, though - that's a definite possibility.) I sat DH down on the Tuesday evening and shamefacedly confessed that I was an idiot who had been focusing on other important things that have been happening lately, and that I was not planning anything particularly blow-out special for him for our tenth anniversary. He, in turn, confessed to exactly the same thing, and we then (with relief) made a pact that we would just get regular gifts for each other and not feel guilty in the slightest about it. :) After all, we spent the day alone together, and we're doing lots of other exciting things this year (like springing for a small vacation this summer for the first time since our honeymoon), so no one can say that we aren't marking this auspicious year for us by doing some really neat stuff.

His present to me, incidentally, was five skeins of Cascade 220 in a really nice red. I decided to make Quadrat for myself out of it. I tried briefly not to be distracted by it, but had cast on by the Friday night immediately following the anniversary. It was blocking by the time I went to bed last night:

Hm. Now what can I use to distract me?...