socks | 365 Days Handmade

February 20, 2015
by FC5 1 Comment

Day 50/365: Fifty?!

Getting started on that second sock!

Wow. Today makes my 50th post in a row. That’s a nice little milestone for me.

In other news, I didn’t go to work today. I cashed in 10 hours of paid leave so that I could drive down to Ventura, because I’m attending an all-day seminar tomorrow at the Pierpont Inn. The name of the seminar is Reasoning with Unreasonable People: Focus on Disorders of Emotional Regulation. With subject matter like that, how could I pass up the opportunity to attend?

(On a side note, I do have to say: That’s another thing I like about working in a prison. If an inmate is being completely uncooperative and unreasonable, I don’t have to put up with it. I can terminate the interview and send him on his way, or once in a while, I can use creative intervention.)

February 19, 2015
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Day 49/365: A Quarter of A Century Already?

Part of my job as a correctional staff psychologist is conducting intake interviews with new inmates who have transferred to our facility from another prison. Today I completed an intake with a 24-year-old new arrival who just started his term last year. He had been sentenced to 19 years in the state pen. As I was going through his files and my paperwork, I looked at his birthday and saw that he was born in 1990, and it occurred to me: Holy shit. This year marks 25 years since I graduated from high school. And: This kid will still have five years of prison time left when I retire.

February 18, 2015
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Day 48/365: Back to The Sock That’s Going to Make the 4th Pair This Year

Remember how I started this sock, and then this unfortunate thing happened?

That night (the 12th), I ordered new circulars from KnitPicks. (It was a completely different brand of needles that broke, by the way.) Kudos to the fine folks at KnitPicks, because they shipped my order promptly and the new needles arrived yesterday (the 16th).

I got to work putting the stitches back on the needles and managed to get as far as knitting the gusset and turning the heel. I’d like to try the Fish Lips Kiss heel at some point down the road, but for now I’m using a basic pattern from Socks from the Toe Up by Wendy Johnson (of Wendy Knits).

This sock will look better on a foot, once it’s done. But the colors are pretty, aren’t they?

This is Patons Kroy Socks FX, which is one of my favorite brands of sock yarn. It’s a tactile pleasure to knit. It is also reasonably priced and generally available at most craft stores that sell yarn, which is why I have an abundance of them in different colors in the yarn stash. If you haven’t already, give this brand of yarn a try. I’ll be interested to know what you think.

February 12, 2015
by FC5 4 Comments

Day 42/365: Every Cloud…

Remember the sock that I started knitting yesterday?

So this happened today:

Ack!!!

Yup. The needle came off the cable on the circulars that I’d been using. If you look closely, you can see that it’s beyond repair: the thin end of the cable broke off, so even if I inserted it back into the hollow end of the needle and tried to glue it together, it would still come off.

(Plus, I already know from experience. This happened before with a different set of circulars/same brand of needles, and I quickly learned that gluing doesn’t work. It was a particularly unpleasant learning experience, too, when the needle and cable broke apart in the middle of a row.)

When I knit in the round, I use the Magic Loop method with one long circular needle. I got rid of all my DPNs a few years ago, and I don’t have any more long circulars in that size. So it looks like that sock will have to wait until the new needles arrive in the mail.

In the meantime, this just means that I’ll have to cast on a new sock with a different set of needles and a new color yarn. So at least there’s that silver lining.

Anyone else have this happen to them before? Or any other knitting/craft-related disasters?

February 11, 2015
by FC5 4 Comments

Day 41/365: The Day I Started A New Sock Anyway

Remember when I had to attend an in-service training just a few weeks ago? We had another one today. And even though I injured myself only two days ago and this morning I woke up with a sore left hand, I just couldn’t sit through seven hours of Powerpoint slides today without knitting. I tried not to, but after the first fifteen minutes of the morning’s presentation, I was reaching for the needles and yarn and casting on stitches.

I knitted slowly and carefully and took breaks when my hand started to hurt. I know it wasn’t the smartest thing to do, but it was the only way I could stay awake through the training and not silently go out of my mind from the sheer tedium of those slides. As you can see from the photo, I actually completed most of the foot portion, which is not a bad accomplishment for someone who was operating with the use of one good right hand and one bruised, swollen, and probably sprained left hand.

I guess that, friends, is the mark of a true knitter.

Or else someone who is just really stubborn.

P.S. I just read over this entry and it occurred to me how much Sean and I are cut from the very same cloth. It explains so much.

The fat swollen hand of a stubborn knitter.

February 3, 2015
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Day 33/365: Third Completed Pair of Socks for 2015 (Orange and Black Striped Socks)

I was expecting a small package in the mail, and it still hadn’t arrived. So I checked my email this afternoon, found the tracking number, and went online to look up the status of my package.

According to the tracking number, the status was Delivered, In/At Mailbox on 1/24/15 at 12:54 PM in Morro Bay, CA.

I went outside and opened our mailbox. It was empty. I closed the mailbox and opened it again, peering all the way to the back, but of course it was still empty.

You know how, when you’re looking for something and you can’t find it, you start getting so desperate that you do things like look in places where you know the thing couldn’t possibly be, but you figure you’ll check there anyway? Like under the bed and inside cookie jars and behind the front door and in the back of the closet. I was starting to feel that desperation. My neighbors’ mailboxes were lined up next to ours, and I opened each little metal hinged door to peek inside and see if my package might have been delivered to the wrong address. Nothing.

In the past, I’ve received mail addressed to a woman who lives on the next street over. She has the same house number as ours. I thought maybe my package was accidentally delivered to her mailbox. So I walked down to her house and knocked on the door.

She was very friendly and we chatted for a little bit, but no, she hadn’t seen my package. I said goodbye and walked back up the street to my house, just as my next-door neighbors were turning into their driveway.

They were sympathetic to my plight of the missing package, but they hadn’t seen it either. I thanked them and went back inside the house. I was trying to manage my anxiety, but the panic was mounting. Where had the package gone? Who had it now? Did somebody open it? Why hadn’t it been returned to me? Would the company be understanding and send me a replacement item, or was I just shit out of luck?

I went back to my Outlook and found the email with the tracking number again. I clicked on the link and was redirected to the package’s tracking details online. According to the website, my package was In Transit. The estimated delivery date was Thursday the 5^th.

I couldn’t understand it. I looked at the email again. And then I realized what I’d done earlier: I’d looked at the wrong email and followed a different tracking number for another item– one that had already been delivered on 1/24/15 at 12:54 PM in Morro Bay, CA.

Doh.

January 25, 2015
by FC5 3 Comments

Day 24/365: The Day We Got a New Toilet

Our house, which we bought in 2012, was built in 1983. It has three bathrooms, which is nice, but none of the toilets are the low-flow kind, which is not as nice, because that means a higher water bill every month. A few days after we had moved into the house, Sean started talking about switching out the old toilets for new low-flow ones. I was on board because it would mean conserving water and a lower monthly utility bill. But he never got around to doing it. A couple of years passed, and then the subject came up again this morning.

“I’m thinking about replacing at least one of the toilets today. I might go to Ace Hardware and see if I can lift one,” old Broken Wing said. “But what would I do with the old toilet?”

“Call the Habitat for Humanity Restore,” I suggested. “Maybe they take old toilets.”

He looked up the local Restore’s phone number and called. The answer was no, they only accepted low-flow toilets.

He set the phone down and looked out the window at our back yard. “Well, you know what that means.”

I knew where this conversation was heading. We’d had this talk before.

“No,” I said. “Absolutely not. We are not going to have a toilet bowl planter in the back yard.”

“Okay, then. So that’s a yes on a toilet bowl planter in the front yard. Even better.”

I kept on knitting and let that one go. I wasn’t about to stop the installation of a brand new water-conserving toilet that would save me a few dollars on my utility bill.

I don’t think he’s really serious about the toilet bowl planter, but then again, you never know. This is a guy who, after that conversation, went to the hardware store, purchased a modern low-flow toilet, brought it home without any assistance, removed the old one, lugged it outside, and installed the new one himself, all with a broken elbow and essentially with the use of one hand.

January 20, 2015
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Day 19/365: Toe-Up Self-Striping Sock

On the drive back down to Ventura today, Sean and I stopped at the best independent bookstore in Santa Barbara. He went straight to the fiction section, and I remained at the front of the store. I was browsing through the blank journals and telling myself not to buy another one when the phone at the front desk rang. It was only several feet away from me. The cashier answered the phone and even though I didn’t catch his exact words, I could tell from his response that he was talking to a customer who had a question. Then I clearly heard him say, “Are you in the store right now?”

To my right, not ten steps down from me, a woman stood in the aisle with a cell phone to her ear. “Yes,” she said. “I’m standing here in the Health section.”

I looked above her head and sure enough, she was standing underneath the sign that read Health.

To my left, the cashier said into the telephone, “Okay, I’ll send someone over there to help you.”

He hung up and said something to a second store employee standing nearby. Moments later, that guy walked past me and headed toward the woman standing in the Health section. I took a good long stare at her, because I had to see exactly what sort of person would make a phone call to the front desk of a bookstore when she was within both walking and shouting distance of said front desk.

“Oh, good,” she said to the employee when he reached her. “I can’t seem to find the bibles.”

“We moved them over here,” he said, leading her to the section of bookshelves right at my back, which was also in the direct line of vision of the cashier who had just answered the phone. “We needed to move them closer to where we could see them.”

“You don’t mean…?” The woman’s voice trailed off.

“Yes,” the store employee said. “People have been taking them.”

January 18, 2015
by FC5 8 Comments

Day 17/365: Second Completed Pair of Socks for 2015

For Christmas, Sean bought me yards of cute fun fabric (including this wrestling mask print), and I got him a skateboard. He actually selected the board, trucks, wheels, and bearings, designing it specifically to go fast around the hills in our neighborhood. The guy at the skate shop assembled it, and then I paid for it. They packed and boxed it up, and then we took it home where I wrapped the whole shebang in Christmas paper and set it under the tree.

The Monday after Christmas, we were up and about, lazily considering our breakfast options and discussing what we would have that morning.

“I can make eggs and potatoes,” Sean offered. “But we’re out of eggs.”

“I don’t feel like driving,” I said. “Do you feel like going to the store?”

“Sure,” he said. “I’ll go.”

It didn’t occur to me at that point in time that he didn’t put up a fuss, because usually he disliked driving to the store as much as I did. If I’d thought about it, that would have been a red flag that he was up to something. But I didn’t, and I kept sewing, or knitting, or scrolling through Facebook, which are usually my top three activities to do when I’m sitting around the house on my day off from work.

(Can you see the sea otters in the background?)

About forty-five minutes passed, and I thought it was pretty strange that he was taking so long to make the one mile down to the supermarket and back. But I wasn’t too worried. He’d probably chosen to drive to another local grocery store a few more miles away. Several more minutes passed, and then he was coming in through the front door with his backpack and baseball cap on, looking sweaty and suspiciously like somebody who did not just drive his car to the store.

“What’d you do?” I said. “Ride your bike?”

“No.” He started unzipping his backpack to remove the groceries. “I took the skateboard.”

That’s when I noticed the side of his pants looked like they’d just been dragged through the street at about twenty-five miles per hour. “Did you take a spill?”

“Yeah, it’s no big deal… Look! The eggs aren’t broken!”

(The ripples in the water really are sea otters. Click for a bigger picture.)

He made us breakfast (a really good meal of over-medium eggs with country-style fried potatoes), and then I went back to doing my thing and he decided to watch one of his Netflix DVDs. The movie was only halfway through when he got up and said, “I kind of am actually in a little pain.”

I stopped the sewing machine. “Do you need me to take you to the hospital?”

“No… But maybe to Urgent Care.”

We went to Urgent Care and sure enough… the eggs weren’t broken, but he couldn’t say the same for his elbow.

January 17, 2015
by FC5 10 Comments

Day 16/365: Stripes

As I mentioned previously, I was summoned to serve jury duty this Friday. I spent most of today sitting in a courtroom. During the morning orientation in the juror assembly room, we were informed that the county was at an all-time high of 184 cases waiting to go to trial. So of course it was inevitable that my name was selected for a juror pool. I reported to the courtroom and sat through proceedings, and at the end of the day the judge ordered us to return on Tuesday because Monday is a holiday.

The good news is that I completed the mate to the toe-up purple hand-dyed merino wool sock that you’ve already seen in previous posts. I also had the above orange and black striped sock that I started in Morro Bay and brought down to Ventura with me. I got all the way to the heel today, but I wasn’t able to take a good photo because the sun was already setting when I got home.

I was able to take this photo this morning in the juror assembly room, though. So you can see how my day started: I got the seat right behind the trash can.