I was going to say "cue the trumpet fanfare" because MY HEAVENS it felt like I spent forever making those socks, but really: they're just socks. A kazoo is more appropriate. I finished weaving in the ends over the weekend and I am free -- whee! free! -- to move on to greener knitting pastures. A sweet little doll for my daughter, a fun hat in a yummy angora blend for my oldest, a skirt for me with some discounted Kureyon that popped up on eBay in just the right colors and just the right quantity after I'd been hoping to find bargain Kureyon for weeks.
My oldest asked for Rick socks. [NB: anyone can view that Rav link, not just Ravelers. But if you're even remotely into fiber arts, you should get a Ravelry account.] These are made from Knitpicks Stroll, which is so soft that I wonder if it will sprout gaping holes by next Tuesday. The first ball barfed all over itself when I pulled it from the center, and between the yarn-barfy nightmare tangle and that tricky decrease on the right leg, I thought I might never finish these socks. But [kazoo tootles again here] I did.
My 8yo kicked off the whole sock fiesta by asking for a pair of Pomatomus socks. I needed to adapt the pattern to fit an 8yo and it took me three tries to get it right. He asked me to use Poems sock yarn, which was beautifully colored and beautifully soft but OH MY HECK I will never buy it again. It breaks if you sneeze on it. It breaks if, like, tectonic plates shift in Taipei. I don't even know if Taipei is near a fault line but I do know this: Poems sock yarn is not for me.
My 10yo wanted Switzerland socks, and I coaxed the 5yo into accepting plain vanilla socks made from some cool sparkly Berrocco yarn. You can be like a knight, I told him, with cloth-of-gold socks. It's a pretty safe bet that no actual knights wore sparkly socks, but his first choice was a pair of Pomatomus socks like Joe's and I was already wondering if anyone ever died of twisted rib.
The toddler, of course, didn't have much to say about sock selection, so I made her some straight-up top-down socks in a great Knitpicks yarn which I cannot link to at the moment. Great colors, and so blessedly non-splitty non-breaky after all the Poems hassles that I could have ordered a dozen hanks.
I am making this sound like it was all hopelessly arduous and I shouldn't do that. I love that they were excited about getting socks I'd made. It was really fun to watch them deciding what they should choose -- they didn't take it lightly. And when I handed them out on Sunday night and listened to the exclamations, it was worth all those miles of twisted rib.
Joe's favorite part is that he can slide all the way across the kitchen when he is wearing his new socks. They're much better than commercial socks, he tells me, because they double as skates. If he enters a sock figure skating competition, I will play the kazoo for his long program.
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