Reblogged from Muttonings:

In a previous post, I said that I would never knit another Aran.  I don’t know why Arans irritate me so, but they do.  The last Aran I knitted, for myself, was my fourth, and I have cursed over every single one of them.  (Three were for my husband.  I figured it was about time I cursed over one for myself.) Socks, on the other hand, are…I don’t know.  The ultimate crowd-pleaser?  I think so.  They’re a bit more complicated than mittens, but there’s just something about warm feet.  And they are …

Living in Germany was a great help in that regard.  When I was living there, I think every woman in the entire country knitted.  You’d see them everywhere:  in the train station, on the train, in the park, sitting at picnic benches in the forest, at the laundromat, knitting, knitting, knitting.  I knew how to crochet; crocheted granny-afghan squares became very popular when I was a young teenager, and even my mother, who hated needlework of any kind, learned to knit those.  I made my first afghan when I was twenty.  But nobody in Germany crocheted, that I could tell; everyone knitted, and as I had always considered crochet a poor substitute for knitting, I wanted to knit, too.

On one of my rare forays to the Base Exchange (the Air Force equivalent of a department store), I spotted a magazine, Somebody-Or-Other’s Fall Knits. (I don’t think it was Vogue.) The front-cover pattern was exactly what I was looking for, a matching cape and skirt in a rich autumnal brown color. And it looked like a fairly easy pattern…if only I knew how. I picked up the magazine and browsed through it, and there in the front were…instructions. Oh, heaven. I bought that magazine on the spot, and the next day, went to the yarn shop in town and bought several hanks of rich brown yarn and a pair of suitable knitting needles. And when I got home, I taught myself to cast on.

Now – knitting takes patience.  Lots of patience.  Casting on, the means by which you get the foundation row of knitting on needles, is especially tough to learn.  I didn’t even know how to make a slip knot.  And of course, what I cast on was so tight that there was no way to get another needle into the loops to form a second row of knitting.  I must have ripped that thing out a dozen times before I got a selvedge I could work with.

Then there was purling.  Knitting was pretty easy, once you got that first row onto the needles; you stuck the working needle into the stitch from front to back, wrapped the yarn around it, and pulled through.  It was just a question of getting the yarn to stay on the needle until it pulled through.  Did I mention that knitting takes patience?  But eventually, there was a fairly tidy second row of knitting on my needle.  And then came real hell, because I had to stick the working needle into the stitch from back to front, wrap the yarn around it, and pull it through again, and this time, that yarn would not stay on that needle!  This is where an experienced knitter would be jumping up and down, saying, “Garter stitch!  Garter stitch!” meaning, you knit every row.  I thought about it.  I think I actually did it.  But need I point out that garter stitch looks nothing like stockinette stitch?  I wanted stockinette stitch.

So I persevered, and after probably about two weeks, I finally had a row of purl stitches on my needle.  Turn it around, knit another row, yay, I get to knit.  Turn it around, phooey, I have to purl another row.

Believe it or not, I actually did finish my skirt and cape in time for winter, and wore them with great pride.  I’m sure they looked as if they had been knit by an amateur; after all, they were.  But I did it.

That taken care of, I returned to my first and favorite needlework, cross stitch, and didn’t pick up knitting needles until five years later, when my daughter turned two.  Just the thought of little fingers and eyes around sharp scissors and needles was unbearable, and there was this cute jacket pattern I had seen in yet another magazine, so I packed away the cross-stitch stuff, bought gorgeous pink yarn, and cast on again – much more smoothly this time.  And this time, I didn’t stop knitting for 25 years.  Sweaters, dresses, socks, I made ‘em all.

It was in 1982 that my knitting life really took off.  That was the year when, living in Massachusetts, I walked into a yarn shop in Lexington and found Knitter’s Almanac, by the doyenne of the knitting world, Elizabeth Zimmermann.  I wasn’t really sure I wanted to buy this book; it looked so Advanced, with no real patterns in it, not like anything I could do.  And we really couldn’t afford it.  But there was a chapter on Nether Garments (September), for knitted leggings.  “I first saw this practical garment in Germany,” wrote the Master (Mistress?), and I was hooked; that’s where I first saw it, too.

I never did make the Nether Garments, but – well, have you ever read anything by Elizabeth Zimmermann?  The woman is impossible to resist.  She charms you into thinking you can actually do this stuff, design your own patterns and make things without magazine patterns, knit in the round instead of flat pieces that you have to sew up, actually do math.  The scary part is – you can.  I did.  Fair Isle vests, Aran pullovers – argyle socks! – Icelandic pullovers, you name it, I did it.  Despite what people have been led to believe, federal civil-service workers actually don’t make megabucks, as I know from personal experience, and one of the ways I stretched a buck was to purchase one skein of sock yarn, cut the worn-out feet off my husband’s socks, and knit new feet onto them.  I still have some of those socks.  The yarn was pretty horrible – it pilled like crazy – but they are still wearable.  I wear them now.

My crowning achievement was my daughter’s wedding veil.  This was not without struggle.  I knew what I wanted to make; I had the pattern for it; I was able to purchase lace-weight wool; but never, repeat never, try to tell a non-knitter that you are knitting a wedding veil.  They can’t conceive of such a thing.  Both my mother (the needlework-hater) and my daughter’s future mother-in-law thought I was knitting a granny afghan!!  And it took me a year to knit the Shetland shawl I had envisioned; but she looked lovely in it, and it made a wonderful christening blanket for her two sons.

After that, I put my needles away and got back into cross stitch.  Until my son, who had only ever seen me knit, suggested to his then-girlfriend that something knitting related might make a good Christmas gift.  The girl bought me the Never Not Knitting calendar by Stephanie Pearl McPhee, who should seriously consider changing her middle name to “Purl” – it was like the rebirth of Elizabeth Zimmermann.  The woman literally laughed me into picking up the ol’ needles again.

I still cross stitch, in the daytime, when the light is good.  At night, with nothing but artificial light at my disposal, I take out my knitting.  In the past two years, I have knitted two Aran sweaters and a hat (and I swear I will never make another Aran again), and am currently engaged in a pair of socks for my husband.   The next pair of socks is for me.

So, when the mood strikes, I make a lot of socks.  The trouble is, as with most sock-knitters, that they do eventually wear out.  I have tried a number of dodges, over the years, to keep them going past their Biblical three-score and ten (weeks) , including Elizabeth Zimmermann’s Totally Re-Footable Sock, with which I am underwhelmed; I just don’t like that oval sole.

My faves are her original-heel sock, with the four garter stitches at each end of the heel flap, and you can even re-heel such a sock, if you knit in a strand of waste wool just before you finish the heel; you just rip that out, pick up the sole stitches, and keep ripping back to the beginning of the heel, then knit a new one.

You can do the same thing with toes; if you knit to where the ball of the foot begins and knit a round with waste wool, you can then join in strengthening yarn and knit the bottom half (the sole) with the strengthening yarn and carry it forward across the top of the foot (unknitted), then pick up the strengthening yarn at the first sole stitch, knit it across the sole, drop it, and so on.  I know, I know, the Great E.Z. disparaged this technique in Knitting Without Tears, but have you looked at sports socks, like Thorlos, lately?  They all have a little fringe around the heel and the ball of the foot, where strengthening yarn was joined in and then cut.  It works very nicely.

However, last year I took a class at my Local Yarn Shop (LYS, in future) on knitting From the Toe Up.  It involved a circular needle, which drove me crazy, and I wasn’t all that wild about the figure-of-eight cast on — it’s not the easiest thing in the world, for the first row or two — especially since, unlike (apparently) many knitters, I don’t have a problem with Kitchener Stitch, again thanks to E.Z.  But when I got to the top of my Knitted-from-the-Toe-Up Sock — ohh, that was nice, not having to worry about whether or not I had enough yarn.

So now I am a fan of toe-up socks.  But not the heel of said sock.  I have yet to figure out how to get that nifty little garter-stitch border on the heel flap, which, on a toe-up sock, is the last part of the turn that you work.  And I like that little border; I feel it gives my socks Class.  They look hand-knit, with that unique little fillip.

So, how to work, how to work my heel down and my toe up?  Hmmm.  Enter The Great Sock Experiment.

I am currently working on a toe-up sock in a nice conservative green yarn from Froehlich.  It’s supposed to be a birthday present for the hubster, but since his birthday is in ten days, and I still have another sock to make, I don’t think this is going to work.  However, I know I’m not the only knitter who’s given gifts on the needle, so that’s not a concern, just a factor.

I thought I’d give my sock a little more give with a ribbed top, so after the toe was done, I worked the top half in K2P1 ribbing, the most elastic ribbing imaginable.  Try it.  At six inches from the end of the toe — not its tip, the point where you have increased the toe stitches to the total amount needed for the sock — six inches from that point, I knitted in a strand of waste yarn at the back half of the sock, and am now ribbing steadily up the calf.  I originally knitted with size 1 needles over 72 stitches — 18 stitches on each of four needles — now that the whole thing is being ribbed, rather than just the top half, I have everything on size 0 needles.

When I have knitted six inches of calf ribbing, I will pick up my yarn from the opposite end of the skein (that is, from the outside rather than from the inside), take out the waste yarn, leave the instep stitches on two size-one needles, and pick up the heel stitches at the back, working them down and around as described in Knitting Without Tears.  It’s a bit like E.Z.’s Afterthought Heel, except that that involved knitting, basically, another toe (which, if you look at them, is how the heels of commercially-sold socks are made), and I am knitting a Classy Heel Flap.  When I am done with it, I will Kitchener-Stitch it to the sole stitches with the waste yarn, and — I hope — voila, done!

I’ll let you know how it turns out.

I would not have believed it — I mean, Elizabeth Zimmermann used to write about “reconnoitring her wool room” for projects — but I have discovered to my sorrow that wool does, indeed, have a shelf life.  What it is, I can’t say with certitude, but I can say, with certitude, that wool does not last last for ten years without being knitted up, or at least shaken out.

How do I know this?  Because my daughter has been married ten years, and for ten years, for some reason, I knitted hardly anything.  (Maybe it had to do with knitting her wedding veil, a Shetland lace pattern that was stunning but took me a year.)  I did force myself to finish some Icelandic sweaters that I had begun for her and her husband, back when they were first married; by the time I got around to finishing them, they had had a baby — so, about six years after they were married — and there was enough yarn left over from the sweaters to make one for the baby, too, which I assume was passed on to his little brother.

Anyway, last year I finally returned to the realm of knitting.  I made an Aran sweater for my husband, her father, and then a cable-knit vest that consisted of an 8-stitch cable interspersed with two rows of purl.  This past Spring, I started work on a pair of socks, knit from the toe up.

And that’s when I found out that there is a shelf life to stash.  The wonderful Froehlich Wolle that I’d hung onto for ten years is shredding:  that’s to say,  the strands have become so weakened that as I knit with it, they pull apart, and I keep having to splice the ball back together.  I get maybe another row or two out of it, and it shreds again.  It breaks my heart, but I think I’m going to have to toss all my stash; it’s all at least ten years old.

The moral of the story:  If you have stash, use it.  Don’t stop knitting.  Or if, for some reason, you come to a place where you find it abhorrent — give your stash to someone who will appreciate it and use it.  It’s not money.  It doesn’t appreciate in value.

Ten years ago, when my daughter got married, I inexplicably gave up a hobby I had practiced for, at that point, 25 years.  I have no idea why:  Whether it was the Shetland lace wedding veil I knitted for her, or whether she was somehow my creative impetus (which would have been astonishing, since she rarely wore anything I made for her), I don’t know.  But the well dried up, and looked to stay that way.

It was a shame, on several levels.  For one, thanks to Elizabeth Zimmermann, I’m not a pattern-bound knitter.  Give me a chart and your favorite sweater, and I’m on my way.  I’ve made Arans, Fair Isles, Argyles, German folk socks, lace shawls — not to mention that Shetland-lace wedding veil — I even figured out a pattern that someone had knitted from instructions, just by looking at it.  I was into knitting.

Then there’s my son, who has never known a time when I wasn’t knitting:  I taught myself how at around age 24, dabbled in it (but my real love at the time was embroidery), and when my daughter turned two, put away all those sharp-pointed scissors and needles and took to yarn and more blunt-tipped needles.  Since my son was born when she was four, his brain is firmly imprinted with the notion:  Mom Knits.  And not even my ten-year hiatus could shake that conviction, to the extent that when his then-girlfriend needed to know what to get me for Christmas, he suggested Stephanie Pearl-McPheel’s Never Not Knitting Calendar.

The Never Not Knitting Calendar is a witty compendium of notes on the subject of knitting.  There are such gems as Purls of Wisdom (Wednesdays), The Way Knit Was (Thursdays) and “You Know You Knit Too Much When…” which last year was Saturdays, and this year is Fridays.  On weekends she has philosophical quotes from a wide variety of thinkers.  My favorite was a quote from Albert Schweitzer, to the effect that killing even the smallest creature was like dealing a death blow to all creation, to which Ms. Pearl- McPhee added the observation, “Absolutely.  Except moths.  He didn’t mean moths…right?”  Any knitter who appreciates knitting with real wool will feel her heart twist at that final word, which comes across for all the world like a desperate bleat for reassurance.

I think this calendar literally charmed me into picking up wool and needles again, or maybe it was the observation that my husband’s collection of sweaters is wearing thin.  Very thin.  Practically threadbare.  I had some wool lying around that I’d been trying to work into a sweater for the last ten years, whenever I’d feel guilty about having bought it, and although it’s very good wool, in a lovely shade of deep teal green, I would knit maybe two inches of something and cast it aside, then rip the whole thing out, rewind it, and promise myself I’d find a good use for it.  I did:  This past October, I worked it up into a sweater vest for Himself, a simple 8-stitch cable alternated with a ten-stitch plain-knit panel, and it turned out great (except for the neckline, which I loused up on the very last row.  I can fix it.  The minute I get a minute).

Now I am in the process of replacing his Aran.  I actually did make him a replacement Aran three years ago, but so strong was my dislike of knitting, at the time, that I made it too small, and he refuses to wear it; and it won’t fit anybody else.  So it’s just taking up space in his chest of drawers.  This time, however, I took the time to make sure I got the measurements right, and I think this sweater will work.  All the patterns are from Traditional Aran Knitting; the center panel is a Trellis stitch, there are a couple of cables either side, and the sides are seed stitch.  I haven’t worked on it for about two weeks now, since I cast on the sleeves; I will write more about them at another time, maybe tomorrow, and post photos when I get around to taking them.

But it feels good to have wool and needles in my hands again.  It feels right.