Sarah, Rudi, and I spent the night at Nationals Park knitting away as part of Stitch and Pitch. Between sock knitting, extra innings, and a delay on the red line, there’s just no extra time in there for blogging.

Until tomorrow!

On each successive round of Sock Madness, I am getting faster, but so are the rest of my competitors. I was one of the final five finishers of this round and expect that the next competitive round (which won’t start until next week) will knock me out of the running. But in the meantime, I’m basking in the fact that I’ve knit three complete pairs of socks in the past five weeks. The latest pair took me a mere eight days.

We got the pattern on Friday evening. I finished the first sock Monday night. On Tuesday evening, I cast on the second sock. It was a chilly evening at the ballpark:

We won the game, but I didn’t get past the toe.

Luckily, when you’re knitting the second sock, you start to know the pattern a bit better, so it goes quickly. I knit Wednesday after work, but took Thursday off for another ball game. Friday, I knit, knit, knit as fast as my fingers could fly until I got so tired I started to make stupid cabling mistakes.

I was not so tired that I didn’t notice, so I fixed them and toddled off to bed.

Saturday morning, I set the alarm and got up to knit. I barely took breaks, and by teatime I had a finished pair.

And, just as importantly, a spot in the next round.

The pattern is Dangerous Turns and the yarn is Hairball Yarn‘s wool-bamboo-nylon blend in a coral hue. It’s one of the skeins the dyer generously sent me after the Tour de France knit-along last year.

I used US1.5 circular needles for the foot and US2 dpns for the leg.

And I’m very happy with how they turned out.

I’m welcoming you in with the pattern for the third round of Sock Madness and a head cold. Let’s plan on spending more time on the former and less on the latter, shall we?

Oh, and let’s also put some effort into nice weather for Sunday, which is the kite festival’s make-up date. I’ve got plans with a dragon.

I promised in my last post to provide proof that I do, in fact, finish projects. I’ve finished four so far this year, but have been bad about taking pictures of my completed objects, so I’ll work on getting some nice shots of the rest to share with you posthaste.

In the meantime, here are the most recent pair of socks, as modeled by their intended recipient:

The pattern is Nornir, designed specifically for Sock Madness 5 by Caoua Coffee. It’s named after the Norse spirits who weave the threads of life.

I bought this Shibui yarn several years back in a destash by Isela (the Purling Sprite) specifically so I could knit socks for Rudi. When I read that this stitch pattern was specifically good at breaking up pooling, I decided this yarn might be the right match. After checking with Rudi that he liked the design of the sock, I was off.

I was a bit worried at the beginning, because the pooling at the top ribbing of the sock is atrocious in an ugly 1970s kind of way. (You can see a little of that in the photo above.) But as I left the ribbing behind, the yarn settled into a nice mixture and stayed that way until I got to the gusset decreases. Again, I was unhappy with the way the yarn behaved, but Rudi assured me that he found it interesting and didn’t mind it. I don’t know if he would have said that even if I hadn’t been knee deep in competitive knitting at that point, but I prefer to think that he just has a more open approach to color than I do.

The heels and toes are knit in Koigu, in a tone that matches the burgundy in the Shibui pretty well. I’m happy with the way they came out, and Rudi seems to be, too.

Plus, I finished knitting them early enough to advance into the third round of Sock Madness, which will be my best year yet.

The little scarf/shawlette I’m knitting on has only nine rows left before I can bind it off.

Unfortunately, that amounts to a smidge shy of 5,000 stitches and several hours of work.

Progress is slow at this point. I hope to be done by the end of the month, but there’s no guarantee.

But it is soft and purple, so there is that.

Just before leaving Connecticut after Christmas, I finished two pairs of socks that had been lingering on the needles.

The final pair of the year was my own, begun last March as part of Sock Madness and was ultimately my dismissal from the competition:

These are Simple Side to Side Socks by Deborah Swift knit in Koigu Painter’s Palette Premium Merino (colorway cleverly titled P141), which I won several years ago in a blog contest. They had a unique construction, wherein the body was knit flat and seamed, then ribbing, toe, and heel were added afterwards. At the time, I did not enjoy knitting them, although that probably had more to do with a lack of sleep and trying to finish them as a deadline ran out than with the pattern itself. I panicked about being able to feel the seams on the first sock as the clock ran out on me and threw the second sock into a bag for nine months until a knitting buddy and I were commiserating about how much grafting had been necessary to construct these. So I pulled them out of isolation and began working on them in my spare time. Ultimately, you don’t notice those seams at all and they’re quite comfortable to wear.

The penultimate pair of the year was Mum’s Christmas present this year. I started them back in September, put them aside to work on a couple other things in October, and pulled them back out in November. I was able to present Mum with only a single completed sock under the tree on Christmas, but powered through to finish the second sock the next night, making them practically done on time.

The pattern is Belvedere by Kirsten Kapur and the yarn is Yarn Hollow Summer Love, an elasticky bamboo-cotton-nylon blend (colorway 113), which I bought at Sock Summit. The knitting buddy mentioned above and I had our own little knitalong online for these and together managed to create some lovely socks, if I do say so myself. The key to our success turned out to be lots of stitch markers placed throughout the pattern to help keep track of where you were.

It was nice to finish my knitting year with two such different sock projects.

And it was fun to model them before parting ways with Mum.