You know the holidays are approaching fast when the restaurant next door turns on their tree. They’ve smothered this poor ailanthus in hot pink lights. I don’t just mean they’ve draped the strings among the branches. No, they’ve outlined every solitary twig. And it’s HOT PINK, people. It looks like a giant faux-coral accessory for a fish tank. Anyway, the tree went on this past Sunday. So I knew I’d better speed through the toe of these socks, my first completed Christmas knitting.

Specs: Feather-and-Fan pattern, my own variation, in Mountain Colors Bearfoot “meadow”. I used US#1 needles on the cuffs, but switched to #0s for the heels and feet. We have scrawny ankles and narrow feet in my family. Shapely, womanly calves? Not so much. We’re plenty womanly elsewhere, thank you very much, but not south of the knees. My mum picked this yarn out on a visit to the LYS on her birthday in June, when I was home for my wedding. She isn’t a knitter and I’m not sure she could sit still long enough to learn to be one, but she has fine taste in sock yarn. Maybe in another twenty years or so, if she’s slowed down a tiny bit, I can teach her. It would be fun. In the meantime, I’ll just knit for her.

Yes, my friends, here you see the maiden voyage of HMS Swift, winding her very first 500-yard skein of Brooks Farm Duet. As this operation went swimmingly, she proceeded to wind the rest of the Rhinebeck haul and then all of Lisa’s Rhinebeck yarn. Swifting is so pleasurable that I would have gladly wound about eight times as much yarn for Lisa free of charge, but she traded me the Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Worsted she had left over from her Clapotis. I’d been eyeing it for the class I’m taking tonight – my very first knitting class, and it’s with Annie Modesitt! I’m going to learn combination knitting and how to create circular fabric. The project is the circular cardigan on the cover of the Fall issue of Vogue, which I quickly dismissed as Not My Bag. But then I got to thinking that the construction was really pretty neat and easily applicable to other garments, so I started imagining a toddler-size version in entirely different colors with a simple picot edge instead of all that boucle. So I’m going to see what I can do with Lisa’s sea green yarn and a couple of beautiful skeins in the colorway Seaside. Wish me luck!

Few posts would be complete without a gratuitous sock picture, so here’s the second Bearfoot feather-and-fan sock romping at The Cloisters in the beautiful weather we had last weekend:

Well, I’ve finished two Socktoberfest socks…but they don’t match. It’s not really second-sock syndrome, because I did cast on for the second feather-and-fan sock right away. But I couldn’t resist the siren song of my Claudia Handpainted any longer. And then I knew I was going to need the size 0 Addis back again when I got to the feather-and-fan foot, so I thought I’d better just go ahead and finish my retro ribs. Here are the two of the most mismatched socks imaginable:

This picture also demonstrates the utter lack of autumn foliage – these are the two trees on the inside of my block (I’m sitting on the wall around my patio), devoid of the pretty bronze-yellow leaves they were showing this time last year. And in another oddity of this year’s strange weather, Retro Rib stops to smell the roses:

Two of my three roses are still blooming. This is my “New Dawn” climber.

Feather-and-fan socks in Mountain Colors Bearfoot for me mum’s Christmas present: one complete; one tenth of second done been knat.

Retro rib socks in Claudia Handpainted: four inches and counting.

It took me a while to find a good pattern for the Claudia sock yarn. As you can see on Lisa’s page, the browns and blues want to spiral around each other like a barber pole. I had intended to make Ann Budd’s Diagonal Rib socks from Interweave, but the right-slanting diagonal rib combined with the left-spiraling stripes was pretty awful. I tried a few basic rib patterns, but I really wasn’t digging the spiral that much at all. Finally, I tried Retro Rib, thinking the many purl stitches might help break up the striping. Viola! A nearly perfect blend of blue and brown. Huzzah!