Layers and layers of duplicate stitch keep this pair of socks going.

He’s building a thing. Sawing, hammering, filing and sanding.

It doesn’t feel like summer any more. Sock season has begun.

I don’t think I will ever knit symmetrical socks again. These fit better than any other socks ever have.

I’ve been making do with small pieces of scrap yarn for stitch markers for years. I don’t even know why. These green things cost like 35 kr for a few dozen. Or actually double that including postage, but that is still nothing compared to the cost of, say, alpaca yarn.

They are ugly but useful. Which wasn’t really a surprise. One benefit that was a real surprise is that because they are of uniform shape and size, I can see just by looking at them whether all my increases are equidistant from each other. Of course I still count my rows but if I did happen to miscount, I’m pretty sure that the resulting misstep in the rhythm of the line of markers would make the mistake very obvious.

I have even less energy than usual when it is so hot, but I did pick up my knitting again for the first time in weeks. And of course “knitting” really means “ripping things up so I can redo them” as usual. (The sleeve cuff was too narrow, despite all the measuring and gauging etc.)

By the time I finish this cardigan, if I add up all the work I’ve actually done, I think I will have knitted the equivalent of almost two cardigans.

Knitting is all about maths.

Sock yarn comes in hanks of 100 grams. One pair of standard socks for myself or Adrian weighs 51 grams. (His are 1.5 cm shorter in the foot than mine but higher in the calf.) So one hank is just barely not enough for two pairs of socks, which is a bit unfortunate, since both Adrian and I loved this yarn. But I can make us a pair each if I use a different yarn for the sock heel for one of the pairs, which would actually be pretty practical anyway, because it will help us tell our socks apart.

This is like an arithmetics problem for elementary school.

Mum has 100 grams of colourful yarn. She knits one pair of socks using 51 grams of the yarn. After knitting a third sock, using plain brown yarn for the heel, she has 27 grams of the colourful yarn left. How much brown yarn did she use for the sock heel? After finishing the second pair of socks, how much colourful yarn will she have left over for darning?

My latest pair of socks.

I was trying to think of a word to describe the colour. It’s sort of a muted brownish red.

In a book I recently read someone got a new coat, the brownish-red colour of which his fashion-conscious friend found incredibly offensive because

It was puce. There was no denying that. It was well fitted, well styled, with a most pleasing swing to the tails, and it was a deep tone that could not be explained away as brown, or red, or anything but puce.

The English language has no shortage of fancy words for colours where other languages make do, and I thought I’d come across most of them by now. I wasn’t familiar with puce, though, so I didn’t understand why it would be so objectionable.

It turns out that the colour is called “puce” (which is French for “flea”) because supposedly it is the colour of bloodstains on bedsheets after a crushed flea. Which is actually kind of icky.

Now I can’t get that idea out of my mind when I look at these socks. But I still like them.

These new socks are growing on me. I wasn’t too impressed with them when I had just finished them, but now I rather like them.

They pair well with all sorts of clothes because of the speckled colour mix. They go well with yellow, or brown, or blue-and-white, or even dark purple.

And the brioche knitting makes me feel them more than normal socks. I’m conscious of them when I walk around in them on bare feet. It’s almost like a tiny foot massage.

I wanted to knit more fun socks, so I bought some fun hand-dyed yarn.

That’s what I thought I did. But since I haven’t used hand-dyed yarn before, I actually bought hand-dyed yarn that looked lovely before I started using it but that I could only turn into ugly socks.

I’m peeved that I didn’t think to take any photos of the hanks of yarn before I wound them into a ball. But if you run an image search for hand dyed yarn then you can see what they generally look like. Imagine one of those in dark brown with blobs of white, dark yellow and violet. Like crocuses and spring earth.

Rolled into a ball, the large splashes of yellow and purple turned into a speckled mess.

I was somehow hoping that the colours would magically align themselves when I knit the yarn into socks, so I would get distinct splodges of yellow and violet again. An evenly speckled result would also have been nice. But instead the colours only kind of pooled, and I got these awkward, sharp-edged spirals of colour instead. Maybe it doesn’t look too bad in a photo but in real life I found them quite garish and ugly.

All right, what if I mix it up with a solid colour so that the repeats get smaller and mixed up? That might tone down the sharp edges and maybe give me a smoother speckled result.

Nope. Now I ended up with a cross between a Swedish tiger and a diseased leopard. Even more garish than the previous ones.

Maybe the yellow was too bright. How about replacing it with more brown, and doing stripes instead of spots? Not bad, actually. At least this looks more like crocuses and earth, instead of a diseased leopard.

Not bad, until I straightened out the socks to start knitting the toes, and realized that almost all the coloured parts ended up on the sole of the foot, and the yellows and violets only reached the front of the foot at the very end. So the crocuses would all be on the sole of the foot, and I would actually mostly see muddy earth.

Time for my fourth attempt. I went back to yellow instead of brown. And I tried brioche knitting, hoping that this would mix up the colours more and get me that speckled look.

These socks actually turned out pretty OK. Somewhat loud. Not the prettiest. Definitely not what I had hoped for. But at least something that I would choose to wear, rather than leaving them in the back of my drawer.

However since more than half of each sock is yellow yarn (half the brioche plus the entire heel), this pair barely used up a quarter of the variegated yarn. What the heck am I going to do with the rest of it? I don’t need four pairs of these!

My cardigan project is still in need of measuring and fitting, and I need to check my pattern notes for my ongoing sock, and I just haven’t like doing either of those. But by now I am completely addicted to knitting during long meetings, or while waiting for some sluggish deployment process to complete. Luckily I remembered my travel crochet project, nearly pocket-sized and super easy to pause and pick up at any time. Phew.

I really need to get on top of the knitting, though. Soon.