Cozy Reading Socks

I knit my first pair of socks!

The pattern is I’m So Basic Socks by Summer Lee Knits, which I think a lot of people probably start out with, and for good reason. The pattern is easy to follow, and Summer made fantastic YouTube videos walking through the steps.

I’m a slow knitter (English style), so these socks took me forevvver: 10 months total, 5 months per sock! Granted, I put the second sock down for awhile after a heel turn disaster—more on that in a moment. I also knit a pair in size L because I’ve got big feet!

Challenges

Getting gauge

I tried and couldn’t quite hit to get gauge with size 1 and 0 needles. I didn’t want to try going down to 00 because the size 0 needles were already so small, so I just went with size 0. When I tried on the first sock as I was knitting, it seemed like a fine fit, but the socks ultimately turned out pretty roomy.

I’ll consider this first pair to be big, cozy reading socks. If I use this particular sock yarn again (and I do have it in another color), I think I’ll try sizing down a to medium. My tension seems to be on the tighter side, so it may be that this particular yarn calls for sizing down a bit.

Heel turn

I had an off-by-one error on both my heel turns, as I got a little confused by the video walkthrough. Summer instructs you to slip 1 and then knit so that half of your stitches are on one needle, so I slipped 1, knit 17 (I knit the size L). If I had followed the written instructions, I would’ve slipped 1 and knit 18.

I fudged it on the last row of both heel turns by just knitting 2 instead of 1 after my SSK.

The Great Catastrophe

With fiber crafts—and this project especially—I’ve learned that it’s often best to just accept a mistake and keep moving forward, rather than try to fix it. Seam rippers etc are our friends, but sometimes undoing creates more problems.

In this case, I tried to undo a few rows on the second sock’s heel, as I got the pattern wrong. I knew it was a bad idea because I’d probably get confused by the slipped stitches in this part of the sock. I did it anyway and…tl;dr my knitting ended up no longer being on the needles.

I tried to get my knitting back on the needles, but the loops were so tiny they kept getting pulled out. Frustrated, I put the project down for a few weeks. Sometimes that’s what you need to clear your head and have a great idea. I experimented with threading the needles into the second row from top, pulling the top row out, and voila, it worked!

Joys ✨

My socks being blocked in a metal tub

• Magic Loop: this was my first time using this method, and I loved it!
• Kitchener stitch: some people seem to not like it, I find it fun? You do have to concentrate to avoid messing up the pattern.
• Blocking: soaking socks in metal basin makes me feel like an old-timey woman. I was also surprised that I could smell the sheepiness when the wool is wet, and how much of a difference blocking made to the shape:

You may also notice that one sock is longer than the other. I based the length of the foot portion off of where my pinky toe ended, and this is how I learned that one of my feet is notably longer than the other! Maybe it’s silly I didn’t realize that already, but it wasn’t important information before?

What’s next

I signed up for the Colorwork Cuff Club and want to try the flowers from August! Stone Knits also has a ton of fun colorwork designs, I especially love the pizza and the shrimp…