In the spirit of more regular posting, a previously undocumented FO: Lady’s Shooting Stockings. These were a long time coming. You last saw them here…

(Don’t try this at home, kids.)

… twelve thousand feet up a Rocky Mountain. These are already well-traveled socks, and I have every confidence that their adventures will continue in their new home with Jen. They were a birthday present earlier this month, and the completion of the second sock is really all I have to show for Socktoberfest this year. Really, it was more of a sweatery October. But here are the specs:

Gentlemen’s Shooting Stockings from Nancy Bush’s Knitting Vintage Socks

Trekking XXL in some long forgotten colorway, one skein

US #0 needles

I really thought these socks were for me. But Jen and I met over a sock exchange, and she’s such a good friend and such a masterful and inspiring knitter that I figured it wasn’t by accident that her birthday coincided with the finishing of Sock the Second. She’s got size 9 feet, like me, and she’d already admired them during our carpools together. (Get thee a knitting carpool buddy if you possibly can.) So off they went to her, and now I’m down to only two mateless swingin’ single socks. I’ve been very good and haven’t started any new ones, but I did buy Cat Bordhi’s New Pathways for Sock Knitters with my sample-knitting money today, and I am awfully curious to try out her wild new ideas. Ms. Bordhi hangs her hat in my hometown, so it’s always a good chuckle to see familiar people and circumstances turn up in her books. She designs socks to commemorate a midnight ride on the sheriff’s boat for her grandson’s birth; I nearly debuted on a little Cessna because the pilot was on his way to the wrong mainland airfield. Ah, island life. I do miss it.

I also miss knitting socks. There’s something so satisfying in seeing them take shape, and there’s very little fiddling with sizes and math and gauge to make them turn out right, unlike my up-against-the-deadline Shibui sweater. Just pleasurable knitting, round and round, with a stitch pattern for interest, and those exquisite wee needles making a beautiful fabric. Call me perverse, but I love my #0’s.

Up next: more finished objects! Yay! And an epic project is born…

   
              
At last I can heed the requests for more photographs of the Colorado odyssey. Thanks to Fred Meyer’s one-hour development service, I was able to get these on a CD before we drove up to Friday Harbor. (Easterners: Fred Meyer is like a local version of Wal-mart, only with better quality stuff and fewer lapdances for Satan.)

Anyway, clockwise from top left: 1. Wrangler Jerry, a 17-year-old Amish kid we corrupted, looking over the edge of Black Face Butte. 2. Sandra Lake as seen from the trail up to the saddle between Wilson Peak and Mt. Wilson. 3. The boys stubbornly disregarding the trail we clever girls found and riding across the Meadows in the San Juan National Forest. 4. The view of Vermilion Peak and Gabriel’s Horn from Black Face. 5. Lizard Head from the trail below. 6. The group reaching the remains of my great-aunt and uncle’s 1933 cabin.

And we wouldn’t want to forget the knitting content:

              
This is one rough-riding sock, friends. And Cassidy is a patient pony, little fazed by the antics of his crazy knitter and also unparalled at following deer trails through all kinds of unwelcoming terrain, even when assaulted most cruelly by yellowjackets. The picture on the right not only captures the art of knitting in a hail storm at 12,000 feet (okay, this is just post-hail), but reveals Phase 1 of a fall project I’m cooking up: dyeing with owl clover. I collected a plastic bag full up at Sandra Lake, and you can see it here drying on my laundry line.

I have no idea if I’ve got enough plants to make a reasonable quantity of dye, or if my haphazard drying process was too compromised by damp weather and the necessity of stuffing the plants into a duffle bag on a pack horse every day. They’re in my basement now, sad brown shrivelled husks of their former selves. Will they still yield a pretty red dye? Who knows. I also haven’t the faintest clue what to do to them to extract said color, so obviously a lot more research is necessary. Pat at Abundant Yarn & Dyeworks keeps making noises about offering a plant dyeing class, which I’m panting to join, but hasn’t given any details yet. Anybody have any good plant dyeing resource materials to recommend?

It’s a beautiful sunny day in Friday Harbor, so I’m going to wrest myself away from the computer for a trip up to my parents’ property to give my two cents on architectural and landscape design. It’s terribly odd to imagine my parents in a house other than the one they built before I was born, but change is good for the spirit. And they’ve got an undeniably beautiful site for a smaller place. Stay tuned: you might get to see a picture of it. Yesterday we went out on a birding excursion and I got some photos I think may turn out well, so maybe I’ll put together a little island montage for you.

Don’t you love it when you hit upon the perfect pattern for a particular yarn and the whole project comes together better than you could have hoped? That’s how I’m feeling about my Gentleman’s Shooting Stockings in Trekking XXL. I spent an irrational amount of time the day before my trip swatching for different socks, trying to find the one that would best complement this yarn, and I think I chose correctly.

                   

This is sock #1, which I’m actually calling a Lady’s Shooting Stocking, as I eliminated the calf shaping and narrowed the foot. I just cast on 72 stitches and worked a straight leg: 72 is plenty for my decidedly non-mannish ankles. I cast on during the plane ride from Portland to Denver, and grafted the toe on the same flight home again. I knit this sock on a horse ranch at 8000 feet, in a tent sheltering from the sleet and 25-degree nights above treeline, and even on the back of my grazing pony in a mountain meadow. (Yes, I’ll have pictures of that, but they need to be developed. I didn’t dare bring the expensive — and heavy — digital camera, so I borrowed my parents’ old film point-and-shoot. We’ll see how well it served me.) The sock and I survived a hail storm, a bath in an alpine lake (I was filthy; the sock just had a little toothpaste on the toe), getting lost (a tip: bring a topographical map when you’re trying to follow a trail in the mountains), a drama queen pack horse, and a swarm of yellow jackets. Two rows were worked by my new friend Nora while I was clobbering my cousin Leith at ping pong down on the ranch. Nora caught the hang of the two circs right away. She’s also an accomplished markswoman, so it seemed appropriate for her to contribute to the Shooting Stockings. (And don’t get the idea that I’m good at ping pong. Leith had been into the Scotch and probably wasn’t at the peak of his game. Pool is more his thing, anyway.)

Unfortunately, now I have three socks without mates: I still need to knit a second Pomatomus, and my poor solitary Retro Rib is pining away in the yarn drawer. I have terminal Second Sock Syndrome, people. And I’ve got this crazy idea I’m going to knit mittens for holiday presents this winter. If that’s going to be any kind of a success, I need to prove I can finish a brace of matching socks. So let’s vote: which pair should I finish first?