It's Time To Talk About Socks

I love knitting socks. I love wearing my knitted socks. As you can tell by the photo of my sock drawer in the previous post, I have knit A LOT of socks. But I haven't really talked much about socks here on the blog lately, so this post is to make up for that.

Plain vanilla socks are the perfect project for social knitting, and because I do knit pretty frequently with my knitting friends, I have knit a fair number of plain vanilla socks. Here is my latest pair, the Not So Plain Vanilla Socks:

These socks were knit out of a fun self-patterning yarn that really kept my interest, and I love the result.

When I first a started knitting socks, about five years ago, it was all I could do to get through plain vanilla socks, so that's all I knit for quite a while. Then, as my sock knitting skills improved, I began to branch out. First, I knit a pair of garter rib socks, based on the stitch pattern in Charlene Schurch's Sensational Knitted Socks. I've knit garter rib socks several times over the past several years. Here is my most recent pair, my Happy Socks, knit out of one of the first Hazel Knits yarns I ever purchased, a yarn club colorway, Aloha, from June 2009. They really are happy, aren't they?

Once I mastered plain and simple ribbed socks, I moved on to patterned socks. The first pattern that I knit was Linda Welch's Spring Forward, and although they took me months to knit, I am still very proud of them, and love wearing them. Here are my I'm Springing Forward socks; I really felt like I was springing forward as a sock knitter when I finished these.

Since completing those Spring Forwards in the summer of 2009, I have continued to intersperse patterned socks with plain vanilla and ribbed socks. I am finding that I always have to have at least one patterned sock on my needles, even if it languishes while I work on other projects. That is the case with my current patterned sock project, my Hazel Knits Mystery Sock KAL Socks, the Chinese Bell Flower pattern designed by Adrienne Fong. The knitalong ran from January 1 through February 28, but I'm still plugging away on mine. This is probably the most complicated sock I've ever knitted, but I am really enjoying it, nonetheless. Here is what the socks look like so far:

I've just scratched the surface on socks in this post, and I haven't even talked about my preferred sock knitting method, two circular needles, compared to the magic loop method or dpns. I also haven't touched on top down construction—again, my preferred method—versus toe-up. Those discussions will have to wait for another day.

The point of this post is just to reiterate what I said at the beginning: I love knitting socks!