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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2pshrhZ:csevet replied to your photo “My mother makes me beautiful socks sometimes! I am such a knitting…”
god i love handknit socks where the stripes don’t even try to match. it’s such a good look and ppl never appreciate it
bebeocho replied to your photo “My mother makes me beautiful socks sometimes! I am such a knitting…”
those are beautiful!! i’m an amateur knitter who can only do hats and easy things like scarves, so socks are impressive to me
My mother is an extremely accomplished knitter. I randomly encountered a classmate of hers from grad school once– a coworker’s mother had gone to their very unusual graduate program, and by coincidence had attended for the same year– 1969, I think– and she immediately remembered my mother as the one who’d brought her knitting to lectures and pissed off the lecturer, but Mom didn’t need to take notes, she just needed to pay attention, and knitting was the best way to make herself do that.
She has a rule, where she can’t start anything new while she’s still working on something old, but socks don’t count. There’s always a big project that she has to study charts to make, and then a little project she can do from memory. So she pretty much always has a sock going.
FWIW I don’t think she knew how to knit socks when I was little. It’s something she picked up after I left the house. But that was 20 years ago now, so in the last 20 years she’s probably knit every member of our six-person family, plus husbands and boyfriends and things, at least three pairs of socks. She’s just constantly knitting socks. All this same pattern. (My father, I think, at this point nearly-exclusively wears hand-knit socks, she’s made him so many.)
And letting the stripes fall where they will is 100% her aesthetic, in socks and in life. There’s no point trying to make the socks identical; they’re clearly a pair, but they’re sisters, not twins. Socks are her don’t-have-to-look-anymore project, the kind of thing she knocks out on airplanes or trains or in the passenger seat during Dad’s driving stints on their cross-country jaunts, the kind of thing she knits while watching TV or having conversations or sitting by the pool making sure the Georgia grandkids don’t murder each other or their grandfather. (They like to play very rough with Grandpa in the pool, who so far can take it but the two boys together outweigh him now, so those days may come to an end and my mother is Prepared to Save Him.) So she’s not going to bother with anything complicated like trying to match the stripes.
(The other thing she can often knit without looking is baby sweaters. Back when she was working every coworker who had a baby got a sweater, often an exquisite one. I think standard one- or two-color baby sweaters are in the socks continuum as far as her project organization goes.)
The big projects she has rules about knitting sequentially are things like cabled Aran sweaters for my father, and her most recent big accomplishment, which was to knit a replica of an extremely complicated Peter Rabbit-themed sweater her own mother had knit her in 1955, for Farmbaby. Those, she knits in dedicated sessions and does not bring traveling.
I asked her if she could teach me to knit, a few years back. She laughed, and said, “Youtube.”
god i love handknit socks where the stripes don’t even try to match. it’s such a good look and ppl never appreciate it
bebeocho replied to your photo “My mother makes me beautiful socks sometimes! I am such a knitting…”
those are beautiful!! i’m an amateur knitter who can only do hats and easy things like scarves, so socks are impressive to me
My mother is an extremely accomplished knitter. I randomly encountered a classmate of hers from grad school once– a coworker’s mother had gone to their very unusual graduate program, and by coincidence had attended for the same year– 1969, I think– and she immediately remembered my mother as the one who’d brought her knitting to lectures and pissed off the lecturer, but Mom didn’t need to take notes, she just needed to pay attention, and knitting was the best way to make herself do that.
She has a rule, where she can’t start anything new while she’s still working on something old, but socks don’t count. There’s always a big project that she has to study charts to make, and then a little project she can do from memory. So she pretty much always has a sock going.
FWIW I don’t think she knew how to knit socks when I was little. It’s something she picked up after I left the house. But that was 20 years ago now, so in the last 20 years she’s probably knit every member of our six-person family, plus husbands and boyfriends and things, at least three pairs of socks. She’s just constantly knitting socks. All this same pattern. (My father, I think, at this point nearly-exclusively wears hand-knit socks, she’s made him so many.)
And letting the stripes fall where they will is 100% her aesthetic, in socks and in life. There’s no point trying to make the socks identical; they’re clearly a pair, but they’re sisters, not twins. Socks are her don’t-have-to-look-anymore project, the kind of thing she knocks out on airplanes or trains or in the passenger seat during Dad’s driving stints on their cross-country jaunts, the kind of thing she knits while watching TV or having conversations or sitting by the pool making sure the Georgia grandkids don’t murder each other or their grandfather. (They like to play very rough with Grandpa in the pool, who so far can take it but the two boys together outweigh him now, so those days may come to an end and my mother is Prepared to Save Him.) So she’s not going to bother with anything complicated like trying to match the stripes.
(The other thing she can often knit without looking is baby sweaters. Back when she was working every coworker who had a baby got a sweater, often an exquisite one. I think standard one- or two-color baby sweaters are in the socks continuum as far as her project organization goes.)
The big projects she has rules about knitting sequentially are things like cabled Aran sweaters for my father, and her most recent big accomplishment, which was to knit a replica of an extremely complicated Peter Rabbit-themed sweater her own mother had knit her in 1955, for Farmbaby. Those, she knits in dedicated sessions and does not bring traveling.
I asked her if she could teach me to knit, a few years back. She laughed, and said, “Youtube.”
