Ruthless Knitting Archive

Since my last post, I cast on and knit four inches of an Endpaper Mitt in brown and green, decided it was too muddy looking (as well as too small), and frogged it.

I then cast on and knit four inches of a Monkey sock in some lovely Interlacements Tiny Toes, decided it was too big, and frogged it. I had swatched carefully for both of these patterns, but neither swatch turned out to be accurate, probably because the swatches were too small.

Last night, wanting to knit something plain so I could read and knit at the same time, I began the all-stockinette back of a sweater in camel-colored Nashua Creative Focus Worsted. This morning, I knit another few inches, decided that it was coming out too small, and frogged back to the ribbing.

Then I got to thinking of a sock I knit in December, the Moccasin Sock from Elizabeth Zimmerman’s Knitter’s Almanac. There’s a bit of a story to this sock. In my immediate family, we had a name draw for Christmas, and I got my husband’s name. I know, that should be against the rules, but I accepted the pick and decided I wanted to knit David some black socks that he could wear to work. Now, David has big feet — size 12 — and I had not previously made socks for him. I decided to knit him the Moccasin Socks because they are re-footable, and I liked the idea that if he wore holes in the socks in the future, I could take off the soles and knit new ones on. (Full disclosure: I also disliked the idea of having to knit more than one pair of size 12 socks.)

My plan became complicated because David didn’t know that I had his name, and I wanted the socks to be a surprise. So I told him that I got my brother Austin’s name and that I was going to knit some socks for Austin — a not altogether improbable scenario, since I had already made Austin socks for his birthday in August. I also knew that if no one seemed to have drawn David’s name, he might get suspicious, so I had my other brother, James, pretend to have David’s name and ask him what he wanted for Christmas.

Meanwhile, I was hauling ass on this sock. I must have knit the thing in two or three days, which is really fast for me. I asked David to try it on, since it was way too big for me and “his feet were closer in size to Austin’s” (or so I told him), and it fit okay. While he was trying it on, however, he innocently commented that it was a nice sock but that he “didn’t think hand-knit socks were for him.” Oh.

Rather than knit him a pair of socks he didn’t want, I abandoned the project and made him a Christmas stocking instead (which you can see here). Then, lest the sock go to waste, I had my dad — who had professed his desire for more pairs of handknit socks — try it on. It was a little loose for him in the leg and too long in the toe, but he claimed to want it anyway, so I promised to rip out the toe (which meant ripping out and reknitting the whole sole and the toe), size it down for him, and knit a mate for it.

Returning to the present: in my frenzy of knitting things and then ripping them apart in the past few days, I remembered the sock and decided that I didn’t want to knit it again, since the finished pair wouldn’t fit my dad very well anyway. Instead, I ripped it out this morning.

Before I ripped it out, though, I took pictures of it so that I could document its short life, and while I was taking pictures I told David what I was doing. We agreed that I had been engaged over the past few days in knitting as performance art. Rather than creating garments, I’d been focusing my energy on knitting pieces of things — a partial mitten, a single sock, and a bit of sock ribbing and leg — and giving them brief life and a small audience prior to destroying them. Knitting as performance art might be compared to sand painting, but with yarn: you meticulously create something intricate and (almost) perfect, take a good long look at it, and then erase it.

I like this concept. It makes the frogging easier to bear.

So, without further ado, I present to you the art piece I call “The Elizabeth Zimmerman Moccasin Sock.”

Pattern: Moccasin Sock from Elizabeth Zimmerman’s Knitter’s Almanac
Yarn: Knit Picks Gloss* in black; Stahl Wolle Socka Color in 9128, blue tones; black reinforcement thread
Yardage: just under 1 skein of Gloss; partial skein of Socka
Yarn Source: Knit Picks; my Aunt Cathy
Needles: ? Perhaps Knit Picks classic circulars in size 1
Gauge: 9 stitches per inch in Gloss; 7.25 stitches per inch in Socka
Modifications: (1) Zimmerman describes making this sock over 44 stitches, but I wanted to use fingering weight sock yarn, so I rejiggered the pattern and knit it over 86 stitches. Rather than do K2, P2 ribbing, I knit the top in garter rib, which looks great but turned out to be too inelastic for my purposes. Also, I think I had too many stitches in the top part of the sock, even for my husband’s generous calves. (2) Zimmerman says to knit the foot until it is 8 inches from the beginning of the instep, then to join nylon thread and knit another inch before beginning the toe shaping. The problem is that she never says in the pattern how long the entire foot is supposed to be, so it’s difficult to determine when you’re adapting the pattern whether you should go with that 8 inches or make the foot longer or shorter, especially since it’s obvious that some part of the toe is meant to wrap underneath the sock, but not how much of it. Turns out that it was not very much, and I should have stuck with her 8 inches, but I figured that my husband’s feet are unusually long so I didn’t begin the reinforcement thread until I hit 9.5 inches. This made very long socks.

Incidentally, I rounded out my performance of this sock by frogging the sole and deciding, after partially frogging the foot, that the Gloss was not holding up to frogging well — the plies, I observed, were coming unplied. I threw the rest of the sock in the garbage. After leaving it in the garbage about an hour, I had lunch, dumped some crumbs on it from the countertop, contemplated it, and realized that those weren’t the plies coming unplied, that was the Gloss separating from the reinforcement thread, which I had forgotten all about. I retrieved the sock from the garbage can, brushed the crumbs off, and frogged it, too. I think this final “scene” only added to the interest and creativity of my performance of the Moccasin Sock.

I’m not sure I can top this one.

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*A note to anyone interested in the Knit Picks Gloss: though the label says to wash garments knit with this yarn by hand, I put the sock through the washing machine. Not only did it come out looking great, with no change to the gauge, but it continued to look great after being frogged — that accident with the reinforcement thread notwithstanding. I’m not going to tell you to machine wash this yarn, but I know what I’m going to do with mine.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 31st, 2007 at 2:20 pm and is filed under Finished Objects, Self-Discipline. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.