Everything you wanted to know about socks but were afraid to ask

Kind of. I am not a sock expert (tm). But after years of being afraid of them, I now find that I really, really like knitting them. Don't do as many as I wish I could - being a knitting-challenged sort of a person, I simply dare not have too many projects on the go at any one time, as some or all of them Will Never Be Finished.

In fact, I should probably at this juncture confess that somewhere in the tangled jungle that is my workroom (sorry, DSM, our workroom) are two odd socks, their pairs incomplete. Plus a sock and a bit, on the needles since.....so long I forget (oh, about a minute, then? Heh.) However.

My next AH class, as I have said (see, I don't forget everything) is on socks. A nice, quick, easy class, I thought, nothing complicated. Until I started rounding up the material, and thinking - well, I could just do a sample for that, and this would be nice, and I really ought to do a fairly comprehensive handout telling them.....So far, I have samples of fabric done on wrong needle size, and on right. A cuff. A cuff with a heel flap. A cuff with a heel flap, a turned heel and starting to pick up the instep (I got into the wrong order, ok?). Next - obviously - is a cuff, a heel flap and the start of a heel. And I find I am having a great time doing this, it is fun. I'll maybe round up all the itty bitty sample socklets and photograph them when they are all done. Who would have thought?

I had an interesting hour this afternoon. A nice young woman called Nicola came to see me, bearing a spinning wheel she had bought in a charity shop. She works at a Steiner kindergarten, and does drop spindling with the children, wants to show them wheel spinning, too. I had expected either a traddy, or an incomplete ornament. What she had was in between the two. It was a home-made wheel, not very expertly, at that. It wouldn't work at all - the wheel had so much play on it, due to loose joints, that the drive band threw off after one and a half treadles, every time. But looking at it carefully, I could see that it had been used for a while at some point, as there was a line from where greasy fleece had come off the hooks and towards the orifice - know what I mean? So, I told her that if she could strip it down and tighten the joints, replace the scotch tension set up with fishing line and a rubber band instead of the thick string and a funny little metal strip, replace the drive band for a slightly larger one so that that tensioner could work, and do something about the truly Heat Robinson bobbin, it might, just might, come back to life. I sort of hope it does. It had a desperate, quirky charm.

Ahem. No, I am not going to say it!