Thursday 5 February 2015

Yin yang Rye socks - a knitting misadventure

Last year my dad fell from a ladder and he fractured his pelvis quite badly. While spending 7 weeks in hospital rehabilitating after having multiple pins placed into his pelvis to help stabilise the injury, he regularly complained of having cold feet. I decided that a dutiful daughter ought to lovingly knit some cozy socks for their dad.


Having never knit socks before I thought it best to go with the basic boy socks pattern from 'Purls of Wisdom'. I bought some lovely Naturally Waikiwi from the Sunspun spring sale and the aim was to have the pair of socks done by Ba's birthday in September. However, a few factors were unfortunately working against me. 1) I was in the middle of a couple of other projects 2) sock yarn is such a fine yarn that for a slow knitter like me a small sock project sti.ll takes forever and 3) life was just going through one of those particularly busy patches and knitting was not getting fit in as much as I had liked.

Well by the time Ba's birthday arrived I was only about 3/4 the way through one sock, so the plan became to give him socks for Christmas instead. About 5 days till Christmas I reassessed the sock project and decided on knitting some Rye socks by tincanknits that called for some worsted-aran weight yarn. I was also going to do some stash busting by using up the leftover Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Aran that I had used for my BIL's Windschief beanie and some leftover random green coloured yarn that I had used for knitting mug cozies for the kinder teachers and SILs.


When we all sat down for Christmas lunch on Boxing Day I sadly only had one completed sock to give to my dad. So, these socks made it onto my January make list and as celebrated in my 'Small victories' post I finished them. However, as this is a misadventure I sadly ran out of yarn and had the small hitch of being unable to find the same yarn. I had bought the green yarn while on holiday in Torquay a couple of years ago from a little shop that sold handmade things. They had a lovely range of handmade knits, quilts, cards, etc., as well as a small range of hand dyed yarns. There was very little information available about the yarn and when I ran out I had little hope of getting more. I had enough green for the body of 1 sock so I ended up knitting the pair in contrasting colours, yin yang style.


So, that's how I ended up knitting yin yang socks for my dad, but at least I finally finished my first pair of socks.

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