No, wake up, kids, this scrap of trivia could win you money on Jeopardy some day. It’s a little-known fact that my small and placid island was once the seat of an international conflict. In 1859, when the easterners were preparing to blow each other to bits, an American settler on San Juan Island shot a marauding pig belonging to the Hudson Bay Company and sparked a twelve-year conflict, complete with forts and garrisons and five British warships, that we like to call the Pig War. Happily, no one else was killed, except for someone who was accidentally shot by his bother and a few British sailors who imbibed a little too much grog and fell overboard. There’s a song about it that we all learned in the fourth grade. It goes like this:

Let me tell you of the story of the San Juan pig / It wasn’t worth much, ’cause it wasn’t very big. / But it rooted in a garden and it nearly caused a fray / Between the king of England and the U.S.A.

And so on and so forth for another umpteen stanzas, with which I won’t torture you. The territorial dispute was finally arbitrated by Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany (he’s in the song, too), who chose to make us Americans rather than Canadians. But it was a near thing, you see? The point is, Friday Harbor could have been a town in Canada. It would be an equally lovely place; possibly even lovelier, because doubtless fewer Californians would have decided to build monstrous second homes there. And if I did hail from the Land of the Beaver, the socks I’m knitting right now might make a little more sense.

I give you the Friday Harbor socks…sort of. (And pardon the non-existent lighting in my bedroom on a winter morning.) Nancy Bush cognoscenti will immediately spy that, due to some excessively sloppy chart reading on the part of yours truly, these are not really the Friday Harbor socks. You’re supposed to see a nice string of uninterrupted diamonds all the way down the shin and foot, with each line of the “wake”, as Nancy thinks of it, extending out to the ribbing. Instead we have… headless birds? Mustachioed men in Chinese hats? Siamese Fighting Fish swimming upwards? I’m not rightly sure. At any rate, I was knitting along so merrily (Size 2 needles are enormous! 49 stitches is hardly any! Fleece Artist rocks! I love this colorway!) that I didn’t notice my mistake until I was all the way down to the heel. And honestly, I didn’t even consider frogging for more than a few milliseconds. I like what I’ve produced, even if it isn’t what Nancy, in Her Infinite Wisdom, had in mind. But I don’t feel quite right calling them Friday Harbor socks, either. And so, I dub them… Pig War Socks. Because let’s face it, I was up to some pretty subversive sh*t with these socks already. The colors are not Friday Harbor at all. We don’t have anything that looks like this, ever. These are maple leaf colors, my people. And the yarn is Canadian, for Pete’s sake!

I’m owning my coulda-been Canadian citizenship. Hey, I could have married a Canadian, too. My little friend Josh did ask. (I declined and informed him that I’d be marrying my brother, “because I really like him, and he lives here, you know.” We were four.) Maybe I’ll plan to wear my Pig War socks to the Canada v. Germany hockey game in Torino. They’ll match the maple leaves I’m painting on my cheeks so perfectly.

I believe my Jaywalkers may have gone last night where no Jaywalkers have gone before: to Carnegie Hall, for a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to benefit Doctors Without Borders. Our phenomenally talented friend Margo was assistant principal cellist, and she tore it up. The socks were deeply impressed. I’ve never heard the 9th performed live, and all I can say is it sure is worth it if you ever have the chance. (Actually, I could say a lot more, but this is a knitting blog and the socks didn’t do anything of note during the lovely bassoon countermelody at the beginning of the Ode to Joy that I loved so much.)

The Jaywalkers, they are done:

I realized that I am not, in fact, jaywalking here. The streets of New York City are just a little too filthy for that. So I did the next-most unadvisable foot-placement activity I could think of.

Mr. Garter really zeroed in on capturing stitch detail in this photo shoot. Notice the perfect clarity of that fang-like cast-on edge. Observe the legibility of that warning label on the ladder. How do we love thee, Olympus E500? (We’re still working on the blog-photography teamwork here. After my sweetie took a little heat for focusing on his dog and leaving the Butterfly socks as distant honey-colored blobs in the background, he was determined to do better. But apparently I failed to explain that you’d all want to see a picture of both socks together as proof that I really had knitted two of these puppies. Every great relationship requires work and clear communication. Baby steps, people. I’ll just have to keep knitting socks so we can improve in each photo session. First we’ll aim for capturing both feet, and perhaps one day you’ll even see the toes.)

So here they are at last: Topless Jaywalkers in Socks That Rock Azurite, one 325-yard skein, knit on size 0 Addi Turbos and decreased to 64 stitches for the feet to accommodate my 9-inch foot circumference. (Is this freakishly small? I can’t imagine it is, but 64 stitches sure is a heck of a lot less than 76, which seems to work for everyone else…) I don’t know why these socks gave me such a lot of trouble. I flew through the cuffs and heels, but then I had to rip the whole foot out and start again both times. Good thing the yarn is both fun to knit and very tolerant of frogging. I liked making the Jaywalkers, but they aren’t going to be my signature sock. The feather-and-fan socks I’ve made fit my feet more snugly and conceal the flashing tendancies of variegated yarn a little better. And besides, there are too many great sock patterns waiting for me to try them. I’ve already cast on for a Friday Harbor sock. A sock named for my home town? Now that’s a pattern after my own heart.

Okay, so I meant to have finished Jaywalkers to show today. But I didn’t kitchener the toe yet, and now the light has gone. And the Jaywalkers deserve better than a crappy nighttime photo shoot in my apartment. To distract you until tomorrow, I offer this:

Mr. Garter’s mother, Alice, clad in the Butterfly socks I made her for Christmas, and also Mr. Garter’s Dalmatian, Atticus. Apparently the Butterflies have been making quite a splash in Portland, OR. Alice wore them to a party at the home of someone who likes shoes removed indoors, and the handknit socks were much admired and exclaimed over. I’m preening, naturally. But mostly I’m just happy to know they’ve found a loving wearer who will put them to good use.