Firsts

These are the first socks I ever made. I made them at the beginning of 2006 at the urging of My Best B. She was a very new knitter and I had made about 50 scarves and a few baby things. I thought it was very ambitious of her to want to make socks when she had just learned how to knit. She was the one who had to convince me to make the socks! I had all the arguments non-knitters have, of why would you want to make socks when...blah blah blah. But she has a way of convincing me to do things that I'm sure I don't want to do. Like spinning...I resisted that for a long time too. So we decided to knit these socks together and try it out. Since we didn't want to make too big of an investment on sock needles and yarn, we decided to start small. We got the double pointed needles at our local yarn store and the yarn at our local Michaels. I think they turned out great for our first try. The gauge is a little loose and they don't fit exactly, but they are excellent slipper socks and I'm glad I still have them.

We've come a long way since then, learning a lot about sock knitting. Which makes me so proud and happy to have received these for my birthday this year.

These are Eunny Jang's Bayerische Socks. They are very intricately cabled and represent 3 months of knitting time spent on me from my best friend.

They fit me perfect and are the perfect color, as I wear purple a lot. I am so thrilled to have something that is so obviously a gift of love, talent and time. It says a lot when someone will take that kind of time for you. I try to be selective about people I knit things for because some people just don't understand what a knitted gift represents.

The pictures of my Bayerische socks were taken at the Torrance Fiber Festival. A group of us decided to take a day trip up to Torrance and check it out. It was really fun and I enjoyed checking out all of the vendors. Below is a group of my happy knitter friends taking a break.

This is me holding my fiber purchases for the day. I bought a bag from Cottage Creations and some fiber from Chameleon Colorworks. The one hank of yarn I bought was from Newton Country Yarns.

A couple of us bought these huge hanks and lovingly named them "Big Bertha". My hank of yarn was 1.32 lbs of sport weight merino. It has 1600 yards per pound, so I'm thinking I have about 2000 yards. It'll be fun trying to figure out what I'm going to make with it. I'm going to start hand rolling it into a ball and see how huge of a ball it makes.

This is Big Bertha draped over my 6-yr-old's neck for perspective. He just lost his first tooth last night so I'm getting all of these funny pictures of him. He keeps sticking his tongue through the space and making all of these funny faces.

Here she is draped over the (highly amused) 3-yr-old.

Yep, good times.