Knitting socks

Lately I have been doing a lot of knitting (compared to most people, at least - not compared to really knitty people like M.E. Hillman). After working on this stocking for over three years, I finally finished it in time for Christmas for Sara. It was one of those projects that required quite a lot of attention to various bits of patterns so I couldn't necessarily work on it during Masterpiece Classic, for example, although it wasn't too bad for things like House Hunters International.


As I was finishing the stocking I was introduced to a new kind of knitted dishcloth that uses three bright cotton yarns and has a kind of basketweave pattern. It's from Mason-Dixon knitting, I think. I made 5 or 6 of those for Christmas presents. There's an in-progress one in the picture below. Then I needed something really simple and mindless so I started a scarf with some yarn that a very nice uber-knitting library customer gave me (she is such an uber-knitter that she made wool out of her cat's hair and knit herself a hat with it). Finally, I had about six years' worth of red and green yarn that my mother uses to trim Christmas presents; first I tied it all together, alternating green and red, and knit it into a really ugly scarf-like thing, but then I was inspired by the tiny socks Sara featured in a recent blog, so I got the tiny sock recipe from M.E. Hillman and went to work knitting tiny socks from the unravelling scarf-like atrocity. You can tell that my mother gives us lots of presents each year! In recent years she has switched to a high-class nubbly yarn in muted shades of red and green; you can see the ball of it in the picture. I used that to make little Christmas stockings for Harry and Daisy.


Below, the finished socks. Two cat-sized Christmas stockings and 10 tiny stockings (I made 11 but I gave the first one away as soon as I made it).