Easy Knitted Socks – Work in Progress

I found myself needing a bit of a crafty “break” and a carry-along project. The answer: easy knitted socks.

The yearn is a self-patterning treat from West Yorkshire Spinners in “Bullfinch”. I’ve never used a self-patterning yarn like this before, and I am delighted at the depth it’s giving to such a simple pattern.

I learned to knit socks almost before anything else, as a challenge for a magazine piece. “But they’re meant to be hard!” I whined.

“Get over it – they’re only a tube, that’s no harder than knitting anything else,” said my editor.

And you know what, she was right. Socks are easy-peasy, or at least this pattern is. It’s available for free, so click on the link! The one thing (okay, one thing of many, but I was a baby knitter) I found tricky the first time I knit this pattern was the instruction:

knit until the sock reaches the point where your leg connects to your foot.

Um. It’s connected all the way around? I asked a knitterly friend for clarification, and she pointed at the front of her ankle. That doesn’t make any more sense written down either, so I’ve made you a diagram.

Imagine that red blob is your half knitted sock (they do all look like blobs until they’re blocked!). Begin your gusset increases when it hits where it does on the diagram, right on the joint which attaches the leg to the foot.

It’s that easy! Then you can do your increases, your famous Fleegle short row heel, and trot smoothly through a leg. That’s where I’m up to now – I.2 socks knit. 0.8 socks to go.

You can see I’ve marked where the gusset increases begin on my first sock, so I don’t have to try the second one on to begin them – fine at home, trickier when you’re out and about!

I cracked through most of the first sock visiting my boyfriend in Geneva (all that travel is hard, but there’s a lot of knitting opportunities on the tube-train-plane-bus combo it takes to reach him). I met some of his colleagues, who told me about working at CERN – a smaller hadron collider (did you know there were two?) and a lot of stuff about magnets. It was fascinating stuff, and I was feeling rather stupid until one of the colleagues glanced at my knitting and with the naked astonishment of a non-knitter who’s never considered how clothes come into the world said, “Whoa! How are you doing that? That truly is amazing.”

“It is amazing, but it’s only a sock,” I said. “Socks are easy-peasy.”

Update – these are finished – and he liked them!