Monday, March 22, 2010

Epic

Once in awhile a project will come along that calls out to you. You want to knit it and it means something. (For some people, this happens a lot.) For me, (in this particular case) it came last December at a fiber swap. There was a stack of magazines that didn't belong to anyone and anyone could take them if they would be interested. I found an old copy of Interweave Knits from before I was really into the knitting scene and (Winter 2004) and flipped through it to see if I would like any of the patterns. I did!

There was a pattern for knee-high socks that called for a reasonable amount of yarn. I say reasonable only because knee-high socks, which I was somewhat interested in knitting for some time, usually call for about 600 yards of yarn. I don't usually have anything in stash that actually has 600 yards and while I wanted to knit knee-high socks, I didn't want to go out and buy yarn just for them. The pattern was simply called Lace Knee-Highs but had a lovely Embossed leaves lace running down the entire leg. The foot was plain. I took the magazine home and thought about it.

If I knit them, I wanted to continue the pattern down the foot, I thought. Plus, I would have to find some wonderful yarn, I mean, this was an EPIC project, right?

Later, I realized that some beautiful roving I had ordered for my birthday from a lovely little etsy shop (click at your own risk, there's lots of lovely stuff over there!), had spun up to be a wonderful 2-ply and was 490 yards or so. The pattern called for 480 yards. I had been conservative in my estimate, and what could be more decadent and special than knee-high socks knit of handspun?

Nothing

I did decide to do the feet plain as written mainly because a)It was a horrible pain even trying to chart the foot and b)I wanted to show off the lovely yarn.

I ended up knitting the feet very, very quickly because I wasn't sure if I would run out of yarn. I didn't but it was close. Like close, close. Like, less than 6 inches of yarn remaining close. Yeah, I mean it when I say close.

Ah, I'm going to go relax with my lovely socks now.

2 comments:

Teresa said...

Yay! You sure did come close on the yarn! Very nice. The pattern is hard to see in the photo. But they are lovely!

Sarah Kalkbrenner said...

Thank you, yes the pattern is hard to see. Hubby took the pictures and Ansel Adams he is not.