Sock Madness Round 2 - A FO Report - Madtini Socks

Well, I made it through round 2. Not only did I get through round 2 but by some crazy fluke I was the first knitter done. I know, the first one! I never thought of myself as a particularly speedy knitter, but maybe I've got some skills.

I sat down to knit after my family had gone to bed and I just knit and knit and knit. I watched TV shows I'd never seen before online. The dog and cat wandered in to keep me company and eventually fell asleep around me. It was peaceful. It was so quiet, and my house is never quiet. I revel in the sound of my children. I love to hear them playing, laughing, and imagining. If they play quietly it is an ominous silence. A silence all mothers recognise as the heralding of certain doom. But this was a different sort of silence. The silence of breathing, and dreams, and a days work done. A beautiful silence. I'd forgotten how lovely it can be to sit all by oneself in the silence and just breath. I wasn't tired, I was happy, and I didn't want to break the spell. So I just kept knitting, wrapped in solitude and contentment...all night. I was surprised when dawn came and The Greatest got up for work. The night had passed and I had finished one sock with only the toe to go on the second sock. The toe quickly knit and I was finished in time to make breakfast for the children. It's a shame my first incarnation of the pattern wasn't right.

They look pretty good one might think. Not to shabby for being knit in one night. But I made an error in the pattern. A sock disqualifying error. I made a stupid error in the first line of the pattern. I can't even blame it on up-all-night-I-read-the-pattern-wrong-at-3 a.m. knitting. This was a mistake in the third stitch I knit for the socks. A mistake I repeated over and over and over again. Without giving too much of the pattern away the stitch pattern for the cuff is *Yo, k2, pass yo over k2* a simple 2 stitch repeat. But I read it as *yo, k2, pass yo over, k2* That doesn't look any different, but it is. I mentally added a comma. That comma makes it a four stitch repeat. That comma makes it wrong. So my socks were rejected.

But I wasn't ready to concede defeat yet. I took a little trick I learned while knitting Starsky courtesy of Knittypant's tutorial. I cut the offending cuff off. Bear in mind that at this point I had been up all night knitting. My hands hurt. The yo pattern was not forgiving to the hands. My hands ached. My eyes twitched with fatigue. I was going down for the count and I wanted a shower. I was a soup sandwich. But I had come this far I was not giving up yet. I took tiny scissors to my knitting and thought "Oh my, there may be no coming back from this." The yarn over pattern was such a pain to take out stitch by stitch from the wrong direction, I was ready to give up. I'm not competitive by nature and this was really becoming ridiculous. No longer the peaceful knitting experience that kept me up all night, this was work, and a lot of it. But I had come this far. I decided to see it through to the end. I managed to pick up my stitches and knit the correct cuff from the bottom up.

I submitted my new sock for judging and the final verdict was good! Despite the fact that I knit the cuff from the wrong direction they took pity on me and accepted my sock. And I was still the first one done. Round 3 here I come!