It was a bad year for socks...

This is the time of year I do my sock round up. It's a little harder this year. Here's why.

The other day I cast off a sock, showed it to my husband and said: "what do you think?"

He replied: "It looks like a sock for cankles"

Which was a very appropriate end to my year in socks. It's just been one of those years.

First, there were the Anastasia Socks. They were my third and final attempt at toe-up socks. I'll try any technique three times, usually it becomes part of my knitting repertoire because it takes more than once to really love it (DPN's fell into this category). Toe-up=hate. I know many people love to do socks this way, you'll never run out of yarn, try them on as you go, etc. etc. I have small feet, I never rarely run out of yarn. One time, I made a toe up sock and used every last bit of the skein, just to see how far it would go:

For the record, that is ~2.5 inches short of my knee, I added ALOT of shaping, and this picture was taken on August 20, 2007. According to my ravelry notebook, I turned the heel on the second sock in January of 2008, it's still not done.

Anyways, the Anastasias. My knitting group was doing a knit-a-long to start off the year and I joined in. I had at least one more go at toe-ups in me before the true hate, and I thought it would be fun. It was fun, but...the socks came out two different sizes! I knit them one right after the other, finished in about two months, which is my average knitting time and my gauge changed so much that they are noticeably different sizes. I wear them around the house, but the two different sizes are uncomfortable in shoes. 2009, sock fail #1:

Pattern: Anastasia Socks from Minty Fresh
Yarn: The Painted Tiger Tiger Cub, purchased on Etsy.
Color: Cool as a Cucumber
Needles: US size 1 DPN

Other than the gauge thing, which was totally on me, and of course the finicky-ness of short row toes and heels, the knit was pretty fun. More so, because for some reason this color and the yarn texture itself had a very odd sense memory for me. The yarn is 20% nylon and has a vague acrylic feel to it. Not so much that I didn't want to knit with it, but more so than other similar content yarns I've worked with. It completely reminds me of mittens my mom had when I was a kid, which I'm sure were hand knit by my grandmother, or maybe even my mom herself ~30 years ago. But the color and feel was almost the same. The whole time I was knitting these I was recalling fond memories of snowmen, snow forts and skiing back home. BTW, they machine wash beautifully and I can't get them to shrink at all. Trust me, I tried in an attempt to make them the same size.

Then, in March, when I finished these, I cast on for my sister's next pair of socks, you see it was her turn and I thought I would have them done in time for her birthday. I knit an entire sock. Rather quickly as I recall, from some Claudia's Handpaints fingering that's been kicking around my stash for >3 years or so waiting to be socks for Shelly. It was the color "roasted chilies". The pattern was Spring Forward and technically there was nothing wrong with the sock. I just didn't like it. Somewhere along the line I decided that the texture of the yarn wasn't quite right for socks, particualarly in the stockinette portion of the sole. I kept knitting anyways, like a fool. Got to the toe, let the sock sit on my dresser for a week, and then frogged the whole thing. A whole sock, just like that, gone. Sock fail #2:

That was June-ish. Just not a good year for socks.