A Personal Chronology in Sock Knitting

The last time I left my city overnight was in late February, and among other things that means that my knitting time has changed. Previously, I strongly associated my sock knitting with two things: travel (especially on trains, airplanes, and buses), and meetings where I could get away with toting needles.

 

I started knitting socks as a high school and university student, as part of my regular attendance at knitting classes with my mother and sister. The teacher was one of the best I have ever had at anything: patient, kind, vastly knowledgeable, and generous with sharing what he knew. No matter what everyone was working on, he began each class by teaching a short stitch pattern, usually one he had made up--even if one of his student knitters was determined to make the same thing over and over, he was determined to share the joy of the things knitting can make. Curious and opinionated (he believed in the Gospel of Wool, and didn't have much truck with novelty yarns), he also didn't take himself or his craft too seriously--I can still hear him saying, with a laugh in his voice, 'it's just sticks and string, it all comes apart'. I learned to make socks in his class, and nearly fifteen years later, that first pair is still going strong.

 

The first pair of socks I ever knit

 My sock knitting habit really kicked off in college, where I managed to carve out regular knitting time during the various meetings that the student groups I joined required. Like countless the knitters before me, I discovered that plain socks are a useful meeting-companion: they are small, portable, discreet, and can mostly be made without full attention.

The second pair of socks

When I studied abroad in Oxford, in 2009-2010, I brought a pair of socks with me. I still remember bringing them on trains and trips around the country, as I explored on my own and with visitors. During my PhD I began to travel regularly, and discovered that I LOVE to knit on trains. By 2014, the time the photos below were taken, I would rarely get on a train without a sock project in my bag. My collection grew accordingly!

My undergraduate socks

 

Socks knitted while I was an MPhil and first year PhD Student

My sock production up to 2014...

I started to give socks as gifts--beginning with a pair for my college boyfriend, whose size 13 feet marked the largest pair of socks I have made to this day (he and I aren't in touch anymore, but I hope they have lasted), and starting a tradition of giving members of my family, and close friends, socks as birthday presents, Christmas presents, or because I wanted to presents. Handknitted socks last for years, and so after a few years of steady knitting, my sock production shifted to being mostly for myself to being almost exclusively for other people. These days, I only keep a pair of socks if they, or the yarn, have particularly special memories attached.

I couldn't write out a list of all of the socks I've knitted--after over two dozen pairs, I can't remember them all at once--but put scraps of the yarn in front of me, or the socks themselves, I can tell you roughly when or where I was making them, sometimes in great detail. Knitters sometimes talk about how what we make is a vessel of our love for the recipient of our knitting, and when I gift socks to loved ones I like to think about this, but for me, they are also vessels of memory, capturing the time I spent on trains, or my first visit to a particular place, or something significant that was going on in my life at time.

Like a lot of people in the pandemic, I have found myself spending a lot of time at home. I have watched a lot of television, which for me is prime knitting time (a former housemate, watching Kill Bill with me, joked that I don't watch TV, I listen to it). The items below aren't all socks--I branched out to a pair of fingerless gloves, which are the purple item in the centre; and three of them were knitted in the autumn and winter of 2019, and blocked during quarantine. By now I have my teacher's simple sock pattern memorized, and a pretty good sense of what needles to use, and how many stitches to cast on, to get an appropriate size.

Socks of the Pandemic, May 2020. I have knitted two more pairs since taking this photo.

I make some hilarious mistakes. Those green socks in the centre are of great length in the leg and the foot (sometimes, if I am anxious while knitting socks, I keep going for awhile and end up with long legs or feet, and apparently, in times of special stress, both). Occasionally, a particular combination of skinny yarn and relaxation will mean that no matter how many stitches I cast on or what size of needles I use, the sock still ends up enormous; conversely, I have sometimes made socks of slightly different lengths--funnily enough, it's usually the second sock I'll make longer than the first!

Over the pandemic I have stumbled upon a new problem--I tried one of my teacher's patterns while watching TV, not looking at the pattern very much, and ended up with a beautiful textured effect. 

textured blue sock, summer 2020

I have not yet succeeded in making the second sock look like the first--attempts to follow the pattern as written have produced a very different-looking sock, so my task for the next few weeks is going to be to figure out my own knitting so I can produce the second sock! 

All of socks I have made during the pandemic will be things I remember as having produced sitting at home, rather than on trains or airplanes as usual. More than ever, those I keep and give away will have love and memory tangled in every stitch.