SassyBlonde

Boo Berry is going to be totally proud of me: today I started knitting my first pair of socks.

At this point I must apologize to Boo for leaving the copy of the starter sock pattern she offered to loan to me at her house like a total moron, which I only realized when I started packing stuff for this trip. I figured as I packed that I would just have to suck it up and finish my sorely neglected shawl, but by the time we reached the Alabama state line on Sunday I realized that a.) I am never ever buying a black car again because there is no conceivable way to keep it cool when driving through 103 degree temperatures in full sunlight, and b.) large fuzzy yarny objects do infinite damage to said cooling process on a personal level. Therefore, I struck out today for Knit Nouveau in Homewood in search of sock yarn and needles and used my Books-A-Million gift card to score a sock book in hopes of improving my odds of avoiding heat stroke on the drive home.

Newly acquired hanks yarn in hand, I returned home with a rosy outlook and full intentions of getting something started before we leave for my grandparents' house tomorrow, and proceeded to unwind the first hank and wind it into a ball.

Now this is where things went terribly, terribly wrong.

You lovely knitters out there know of the existence of such things as yarn-ball winders, which I mostly blithely ignore and hand wind my erstwhile balls (Dancing Dragon can feel free to take a snipe at that one-- I would.) This becomes a problem with fingering weight yarn, which is light and delicate and has a tendency to crawl all over itself in the unwinding process, so by the time my husband took a break from practicing I had yarn strung hither and yon, to and fro across my parents' family room. He entered the room and skidded to a halt just shy of clotheslining himself on a strand looped from the rocking chair to the couch, and quirked an eyebrow at the frothy pinkness adorning every outcropping.

"Don't. Ask." I said as I doggedly chased trough loops and returns with my toilet-paper-roll shuttle, winding and cursing. He chuckled and went back to tooting and I eventually got the mess sorted out, just in time for my mom to come home and look at me as if I had lost my mind.

At this point I had cast on and was off around the track of my double pointed needles, which, if you've never seen a knitter work with them, look kind of like you're wrestling a baby porcupine. She moved on and in a couple of minutes I had a nice respectable start to my cuff. By the time of this post I had worked out the trick of starting the heel flap and voila, the picture you see above. Maybe by the time I get home I'll have a pair of nice new pinky-purple socks on under my Danskos. There's someting to be said for 16 hour car trips, right?