Making Repairs
This has been the winter of sock disasters around here. It started off as a very normal winter. My husband made a dive for his wool socks as soon as the weather turned cold. He wore them all winter. However, one day, doing the wash, I discovered the awful truth. One of my husband’s socks was missing. Now, I was very controlled about it and didn’t come undone. I have no idea how a sock, a hand-knitted wool sock, could manage to be lost in this house, but it is. I’ve given up finding it. Maybe the washer ate it. The result of this is that I’ve reverted to an old practice of mine which I’d abandoned at some point. Now, I wash all my wool socks in a lingerie bag. The washer can’t swallow a whole bag of them!
The second incident involved a pair of my own socks. During a cold spell, I put a pair of my socks on, and I was floored to discover that something had gotten to them and chewed holes in them–my Cherry Tree Hill yarn socks! I was so disgusted. I looked carefully at my other wool socks, but whatever it was didn’t think they were worth stopping to taste. Thank goodness! I hadn’t seen a thing in that drawer, but something got to them. I had a hole in the toe of one sock and a hole a couple of inches down from the top of the other sock.
After I got over being mad about it, I decided I wanted to save the socks. I’d worn them very little; moreover, the yarn was some I’d gone to a lot of trouble to get, and the socks were favorites of mine. So I ripped out the top of the sock that had a hole there, and reknitted that. That was pretty easy to do, although it took me a while to remember exactly what the pattern was for the leg of that sock. Luckily, I did have a couple of small balls of yarn left over, and I needed very little of that as the original yarn could be reused–minus several inches where it had been chewed and had to be cut out. Dealing with the hole in the toe took a little longer. The first thing I decided was that I really needed a darning egg to do the job right–that is, without having to redo the toe completely, but I didn’t have one. Not wanting to wait until an order for a darning egg could come in, I found several things I could use as a substitute darning egg, but I finally decided that it would be just as easy to reknit it. It was fairly close to the end of the toe.
The socks had been knitted toe up, but I decided I could knit it down if I took out the sock toe. So that’s what I did. I ripped back until I could find solid yarn beyond the hole, picked up the stitches, and reknitted the toe and darned in the ends. Now, I have two wearable socks again. If there’s any difference in the color of the yarn, I can’t tell it since I washed them. I did order a darning egg to have on hand, though, in case another disaster strikes.
Dishcloth Knitting
I have been knitting a few dishcloths. I did this little blue bunny dishcloth the other day as part of the Dishcloth KAL. It’s cute and easy to do.
Then I started the KAL for April, but I realized that it was three crosses, and I ripped it out. I’m uncomfortable doing something as mundane as washing dishes with something that has a religious symbol on it, though it didn’t appear to bother any other knitters. When I got it ripped, I just began to knit, and I came up with a triangle patterned cloth that pleased me a lot.
Our Two Dollar Laugh
When I was in a store the other day, I happened on this chicken, and I couldn’t resist it. As a child, I had a chicken similar to this in an Easter basket. I seem to recall having to pat the early one to get it to lay an egg; this one, you wind up. Then it walks jerkily along and periodically and forcefully ejects a bubble gum egg. I thought it was hysterical, so I brought it home and showed it to my husband. He’d never seen one, and we thought it was very funny. The sight of that thing lurching along the top of his computer apparatus, shooting eggs right and left was something to behold. Hey, it was a $2 laugh, and we got our money’s worth out of it.
