Sock Mania

Wow. Nothing but socks. This is kind of weird, but it has lightened my baggage quite a bit. I only carry my little Julip sock knitting bag with me now, and have stored away almost all my other projects (which means I've taken them upstairs and dumped them on the pile in the sewing room.)

First pair of socks for SOS'08:

These are from Chestnut Bay Fibers in "Sunrise" Merino Superwash. It's so hard to get the colors right in the photo--they're much softer than they look.

I started these at midnight, June 21, and finished them sometime late June 22. I wanted to see if I could knit a sock in a day, and I managed to do that while listening to "Jane Eyre" on my iPod. My hands were pretty tired, but the socks went a little faster than I expected. Unfortunately, the leg section was 8" long, so that slows down sock production a bit! The requirement for the contest is that the leg part be at least 2" long, so I could have turned out a couple of pairs in the time it took me to knit these. Alas, I don't like short socks, and I'm not knitting socks just for the sake of the contest, though it is a motivating factor. Maybe in the fall I should start a contest for knitting the most Dale of Norway sweaters! Snort.

Now I have sock #1 of pair #2 finished, and am well on the way on sock #2. I'd like to get them done tonight. I'm anxious to move on to the next yarn tucked away in my bag. I've forgotten what I have!

Meanwhile, I'm trying to do a little housework between sock-knitting phases, and keep my flowers tidy and weed-free. Not so much success there. I have some really spectacular thistles coming up in the back flower bed. But look at my hollyhocks!

I do love hollyhocks so. Someone a few blocks away has some lovely pale pink ones, and I plan to go begging for seeds in a week or two, when the seedpods have set. They're simple, they come back without any help (in fact, you can't kill them once they've taken hold, which is a definite plus for anything in my garden,) and they just scream "English cottage garden!" I'd love to have some foxgloves too, but I'm afraid it gets too hot here for them. I did put out a couple of delphiniums that I bought on sale right before the market closed for the season, but again, I worry that it will be too hot for them. We'll see.

In other agricultural areas, here are our fruit trees:

If we can actually keep the bugs from eating all these, they will be the best, sweetest little pears you could ever taste, and I don't even like pears! At least not those hard grainy things you get in the grocery store.

The peach tree is just as loaded. We've not really gotten any peaches before--usually the Japanese beetles eat them all, but I plan to keep spraying this year. It goes against the grain, but I would like to have at least a couple peaches off this tree some time.

We used to have a beautiful old apple tree, too. The first spring we lived here it just exploded with blossoms, and I could smell them all through the house. I'd never smelled apple blossoms before (real city girl here!) But it was so old that it was rotting from the center out, and it set so much fruit that year that every storm brought down another chunk. The next summer the whole thing came down. I'm glad I got to enjoy that one spring though. This fall I plan to get at least one nice maple, if not two or three, so we can have some shade and color in our big lot.

Off to work on socks!