FO Friday: Lots of socks!

It's been a producive couple of weeks of sock knitting, so for FO (finished object) Friday I have not one, but two pairs of socks to share with you.

When my aunt and uncle sent out save the date cards earlier in the year for their joint 70th birthday party, I knew that I wanted to knit them each a pair of socks. I think handknitted socks are prety much the perfect present: every stitch is knitted with love, and even if someone already has some handknitted socks, they do eventually wear out, so you can't really have too many. Once I had decided that I wanted to knit socks I contacted my cousin to see if he could find out my aunt and uncle's shoe sizes for me, which he did.

I had known for months that the party would be in mid-October, but for whatever reason didn't cast on the first pair of socks until the start of September, and knitted the first one and a half socks around other projects, rather than dedicating any proper knitting time to them, which meant the final two and half socks were knitted at super high speed last week. One day I will learn!

The first pair of socks I knitted was for my uncle. I used Regia Pairfect*, which is designed to be knitted from the top-down, and pulled from the centre of the ball. This isn't my favourite way of knitting socks (I usually knit them toe-up), or way of pulling yarn from a ball (I usually work outside in), but I decided to go with it, and used Kate Atherley's book Custom Socks to guide me through the sock knitting process. I LOVE this book. It has lots of very useful information inside, including a table of shoe sizes and how they correspond to foot measurements, as well as basic top-down and toe-up sock patterns for lots of gauges.

The socks knitted up really nicely, and other than a little tangling at the start of the ball of yarn, pulling from the centre of the ball was ok too. One huge advantage of the top-down sock pattern in Custom Socks is that it doesn't require grafting at the toe, instead you draw up the final few stitches and secure them in place. As I'm not a fan of Kitchener stitch, I think I'll use this toe method again, should I ever knit more top-down socks.

There might be ambitions for more complex sock construction somewhere along the line!

Ta dah! Finished socks!

All wrapped and ready to go

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The socks for my aunt were always going to be quicker than the socks for my uncle. I am used to knitting socks in UK size 9+, so UK size 5.5 socks always seem tiny. But realistically, I should have cast the socks on before the Thursday before the Sunday party! I had never before managed to knit socks in under 5 days, and that was a pretty intensive experience. But all I could do was try, so I cast on the socks and got knitting.

I decided that as both pairs of socks were going to the same household I would use the same construction, so again following the pattern in Custom Socks. My aunt loves the colour red, so I had a bit of a think, and remembered that I had some West Yorkshire Spinners Signature 4ply* from their bird range that featured red stiripes (Bullfinch) in stash, and that I had the coordinating solid (Cayenne Pepper), so decided to combine the two, using the solid for the cuffs, toes and heels and the stripes for the rest of the sock.

I had forgotten how much I like working with the bird stripe colopurways: the stripes are quite short, so I always feel like I'm making speedy progess, and the repeats mean you can measure how much progress you're making (and whether you're on track for your stupidly tight deadline). I took these socks everywhere for the latter part of last week - in the car, in the kitchen, to drinks, to dinner, to breakfast... I even knitted on them while sat on a wall outside King's College in Cambridge city centre (and only got the ocassional odd look).

By Sunday morning I still had half a foot and toe to go. And if I had nothing else to do I could have completed them before we got to the party. But in the end I hid in a corner for the first 30 minutes of the party and quickly did the final few rounds, then hastily darned in the final few ends before putting the completed socks into their gift box and adding them to the pile of presents. I would have loved to get better FO photos of these socks, but it wasn't to be. If you imagine the first sock looks like the second you're there!

In the end I managed to get the second pair of socks knitted in about three and a half days, which is pretty insane when even I think about it! Remind me next time I have a birthday deadline to allow myself at least a week to get the socks knitted!

The state of play on Friday morning. Maybe a little behind schedule...

Slight hold-up! For some reason I struggle to keep count while knitting toes, and sometimes it's easier to start the toe again than to try and fix it!

One sock down!

The finished socks, all ready to gift

 

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Regia Pairfect socks
Yarn: Regia Pairfect* in Waterfall 7114
Size 9.5 (UK)
Ravelry page

West Yorkshire Spinners socks
Yarn: West Yorkshire Spinners Signature 4ply* in Bullfinch and Cayenne Pepper (heels, toes and cuffs)
Size 5.5(UK)
Ravelry page

*Affiliate link.

Yarning Along: Record socks

This time last week I was one a half socks into a four sock deadline. Did I make the deadline? Well, sort of! Somehow, through some serious speed knitting, I managed to get both pairs of socks completed by the end of the party (yes, that does mean I was still working on them when we arrived). I think these socks deserve a post of their own, which I'm going to save for FO Friday, but here they are in all their giftwrapped glory!

Having finished my gift socks, I am back to the autumnal socks I gave you a sneak peak of last week. The yarn is Paintbox Yarns sock yarn,* which will be available from Love Knitting** by the end of the month. I'm going to give these socks a full post to themselves when I review the yarn, so keep an eye out for that, but for now, just enjoy those beautiful stripes.

This week has felt long and we're only on Wednesday. The party we went to at the weekend was in Cambridge, which is a very long way from Durham, and we only spent one night there, so we spent a lot of time in the car. It was worth it though as we managed to catch up with friends, spending the afternoon walking round the parkland at Wimpole Hall, which was gloriously autumnal, before having dinner with my sister and her family, followed by drinks with just my sister after our children were safely asleep in bed. We nipped into Cambridge very briefly on the Sunday morning to show the city off to my brother in law who had never visited, and my son, who is currently studying the Tudors at school, was very excited to see all the Tudor buildings in the city centre. I spent three years living in Cambridge and it is one of my favourite places, so I was delighted to be back, even if it was only for an hour. The party itself was wonderful. I met many of my mum's relatives who I hadn't seen in years, and some that I had never met. The party was held in one of the Cambridge colleges, and the kids loved exploring the gardens and chasing the squirrels.

Yesterday I went into town to queue to get tickets for the Lumiere Festival, a biannual festival held in Durham city centre. I've been to all previous events and am looking forward to it again this year. Some of the event is held on the Durham peninsular, and tickets are required to enter that area between 4.30pm and 7.30pm on festival days. Having been to all the previous years, I know how busy the event can be outside these hours, when access becomes unrestricted and the area becomes very crowded, and as tickets are free queuing for them yesterday morning as soon as they became available seemed like the only sensible option. I ended up queueing for an hour, which was actually a bit less time than I expected. I took a book (I can't knit while standing up, I'm not sure I've shared that here before!) and read my way round the queue! I'm still reading Autumn by Ali Smith, and while I am not disliking it, I am unsure of where it's going and what its conclusion will be. Also, the book has no speech marks to indicate when someone is talking, which is annoying!

As ever, linking up with Rachel for Yarning Along. What are you crafting on and reading this week?

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Don't forget, I'm currently running a competition for my blog's first birthday. More details can be found here.

*Yarn provided by Paintbox Yarns for review purposes. All opinions are my own.
**Affiliate link.

Yarning Along: I had no plans for Socktober

In the online knitting world, October is referred to as Socktober, a celebration of all things sock.* Many people set themselves sock-related challenges, such as knitting their first pair of socks, knitting as many pairs of socks in a month as they can, knitting some socks for charity, or trying a new sock construction. This year I decided that I wasn't going to get involved in any Socktober activities, but here we are, one third of the way through the month, and I have a lot of sock projects on my mind.

This weekend I am going to a family birthday party, and I decided months ago when the save the date card arrived that I would knit a pair of socks for each of the two hosts of the party. And now, four days before the party I have almost one pair of socks (knitted in Regia Pairfect). Which isn't quite enough - I can't give one host a pair of socks and not the other! So for the rest of this week, I'm going to be using every spare minute to whip up a second pair of socks, in West Yorkshire Spinners Signature 4 ply, and keep my fingers tightly crossed that I can get them finished on time.

A little disco sheep progress marker to help me make the socks the same length

I have another half finished pair of socks that have been on the needles for too long. The socks are knitted in some brand new sock yarn that I have been lucky enough to get my hands on before the yarn's official launch next week. These socks have been my out and about/leisurely lunch socks for the past month or so, and while I am very pleased to have one sock complete, I probably should have a full pair by the time the yarn launches next week. In the meantime, here's a tiny sneak preview. Aren't those colours perfect for the season?

This month I also need to knit a pair of socks as a magazine commission (and yes, that is all I can say about them), and I really, really want to cast on my superb self-striping Halloween sock yarn from Strawberry Fields Yarn, but at this point I'm not sure that's going to happen. Ah well, next month I'm sure I'll be casting on some special festive socks to wear in December!

*Socktober didn't start as a knitters event. Socktober was coined by Brad Montague in the US in 2011 as a charity collecting socks locally to distribute to the homeless. This initiative is ongoing, and more information can be found on the Socktober website.

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This title of this week's book is very seasonal: Autumn by Ali Smith. I've been reading this for a little over a week now, and while I don't feel like I've made that much progress I am enjoying the variation in writing styles between chapters, and the relationship between the central characters (a child, her friend, whose is an older male neighbour, and her mother). There have been lots of little gems in the writing that have made this an enjoyable read so far.

As ever on a Wednesday, linking up with Rachel for Yarning Along.

Yarning Along: A top-down challenge

This week's Yarning Along finds me just the tiniest bit tired. On Sunday I went to Yarndale with my friends Sam and Jo and had the best time (yes, there will be a full post about Yarndale in a few days time), but that combined with the usual mild winter lurgies means knitting time has been a bit limited by my need to get a few early nights!

I'm currently working on a lot of top secret projects that will make their appearance in the new year, but there is one project I can share: some top-down socks in Regia Pairfect.* I've used this yarn before and it really appeals to my perfectionist tendencies. The yarn is designed in such a way that it will always result in two perfectly matching socks, and comes with stitch counts for various foot sizes. The one drawback with the yarn is that it forces you to knit the socks top-down, which is unusual for me. I'm using the basic sock pattern from Custom Socks (an excellent comprehensive book, for the sizing charts alone), but I did somehow manage to knit the heel flap over the wrong number of stitches as I hadn't divided the stitches evenly for the ribbing and didn't think to check before working the heel. So I'm now halfway through my second attempt at the heel.

I am still reading Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, and am a little less enthusiastic about it than I was last week. I am finding the writing style very, very readable, and have been making an effort to read when the house is quiet, but the main character is annoying, and I'm finding that certain aspects of the story aren't ringing true for me. I was starting to think that the story might be a little predictable, but the bit I was reading last night had a sudden change of pace, so it's possible this book might be surprising in the end.

One other thing I've been doing a bit more of in the past couple of weeks is baking. I haven't especially enjoyed the current series of Bake Off; I'm finding the editing of this series is making the format more formulaic than it needs to be, and am annoyed that the adverts make the running time of the show excessively long. I wondered whether doing some baking myself might make me more enthusiastic about the show, so last week I baked some blondies with peanut butter** that were amazing (and the kids didn't like them at all, so I didn't have to share), and this week I baked a simple chocolate cake, which was delicious, and I did enjoy last night's episode a little more, so maybe it's working!

Linking up with Rachel for Yarning Along.

*Affiliate link.

**Recipe from Bake by Rachel Allen.

Boxing Day (or a-sock-in-a-day day)

Happy Christmas, I hope you all had a good one! We had a chaotic day of present opening and food eating. An excellent day! I only received one ball of yarn, which was a bit of a relief as I already have rather a lot (and still haven't used all the yarn from last Christmas), and that was from a Secret Santa that mandated the inclusion of yarn (knitters are good at Secret Santa, and Secret Santa between knitters often becomes something of a yarn swap). The yarn is Regia Pairfect, which had been on my wish list for a while - it's designed to make it easy to knit two identical socks (there are yellow starter threads to show you where to start your socks, and the yarn changes when you have to knit the heel) - and was on the needles by the end of Christmas Day once the kids were in bed.

The day after Christmas is a bank holiday in the UK, and is called Boxing Day. The kids were happily entertained with their new toys, and we had no other plans, so I spent much of the day sitting and knitting. So much so that I managed to knit a sock in under 24 hours, which has never happened before! The yarn is standard Regia, nothing luxurious, but nice enough to work with, and the socks will wear really well (the yarn has a 10-year guarantee); I found the stripes really motivational as I raced through the socks.

Today has been a little busier, with the kids not quite so intent on enjoying their gifts, and other things have needed doing (like laundry, there's always laundry!), so sock progress has been rather slower today: I am still on the ribbing! I will get through them by New Year though, then they're going in the present box - I have size 10 feet, which handily matches a lot of other people I know - I am definitely going to be ahead of the game for next Christmas!