On the 19th of December I began to make a pair of socks for an adult man, with the goal of giving them to him for Christmas. If you are not a knitter, you probably didn't gasp at my audacity. It warrants a gasp or two, though.
I've made socks with short deadlines before, but only for women. There is considerably more acreage in a man's size 11 foot than in a woman's size 7 foot. And in the past I had the good sense to stick to a straightforward pattern, in a window when there wasn't much else going on. If you're undertaking a 7-hour drive, you might as well knit like fury while you're in the passenger seat. It doesn't work if you're busy. It doesn't make any sense to knit a pair of men's socks with less than a week to go until Christmas.
Back in 2012 my oldest son asked me for a pair of Space Invaders socks. They were slow and painful: the leg has 91 stitches per round, on size 0 needles. The charts are not intuitive, since most of us don't spend much time knitting pictures of aliens, and the colorwork sections are technically challenging because of all the long floats. They were a total pain in my butt. But he loved them. Over the years he made a special point of wearing them when we were together. They had acquired the status of special occasion socks as they grew more weathered, and I had made noises about replacing them, but when I thought about the time required to knit another pair my heart would sink.
But I love that boy, and he is the hardest person in my orbit to buy for, and so I said to myself, "This is the year, self!" On a dark and windy Tuesday evening, six days before Christmas, I went out and bought yarn. That night I dove in.
Handknit items are a gift of time even when all goes smoothly. If a person mashes up two aliens accidentally and then rips back because her firstborn deserves CORRECT aliens, even more time is required. If a person needs three cracks at the fiddly short-row heel, she will notice that Christmas is GALLOPING closer at a speed that does not leave room for any more mistakes. If she painstakingly knits her firstborn's birthdate into the high score portion of the second sock's leg and only realizes afterward that the 6 in the pattern is actually backward, she might need to do some deep breathing. (Seriously, Knitty, that error has been sitting there on your site since 2007! Fix it already!)
My goal was to get down to beginning of the toe before I gave them to him, so I could check the fit. I put the live stitches on scrap yarn and wrapped them up just like that. I'm glad I did, because I had been asking Joe to try them on for me and Alex's feet are a little longer. On Christmas night I finished the first sock, with its fiddly short-row toe and its long whack of Kitchener stitch and its eleventy-zillion ends to weave in.
On December 26 we were driving to the Chicago 'burbs to meet my in-laws for lunch at a restaurant, and Alex was leaving in the late afternoon to catch his flight back to NYC. I worked steadily at the second toe as we headed their way, but I made a mistake because I was trying to play B is for Botticelli at the same time. I ripped it back and did it again correctly. I started the second long whack of grafting and discovered that car grafting makes me carsick in a way that car knitting never has. We were early for lunch, so I held my sock discreetly under the table and finished it off. Grafting, check. Ends woven in, also check. I laid them in my lap to take a picture.
I handed them over with a modest smile of triumph. If someone wanted to buy a pair of these socks from me, I would charge them a thousand dollars. Wear them in good health, Alex, and never doubt that your mother loves you.
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