It’s not Chariots of Fire, but still.
The Spit is Exhausted.
It has performed its tast admirably, and I will return to it again and again. But not for this project! For I have finished! I have… SOCKS!
Yesterday morning, I completed the toe of the sock (part two). I had before me two wrinkly tubes of gold:
What to do? Why, block, of course. But first I needed to make blockers:
Hershey helped. A little Trivial Pursuit didn’t hurt, either.
Eventually, the socks were washed in Eucalan wool wash (which I have on hand for handknit socks and wool diaper covers and which is wonderful), and molded to the blockers:
Look! They look like… like… socks now. I left them there to dry while I watched Battlestar Galactica.
(It was weird to knit something else while watching. I worked on a sweater for Ben, which was this close to being finished when I began the socks and I swear, I was convinced that he would outgrow it by the time the socks were done. Even if I did manage to finish the socks in two weeks. Which I knew I couldn’t do. I figured I’d finish them in June, in time for Ben to wear the sweater as a fitted short-sleeved crop top. Knitting for small children is rewarding because they look so darn cute in handknit items, and easy because they take a fraction of the time of adult garments, but they outgrow them in about 12 seconds. I usually knit Ben hats.)
So I spent this morning touching the sock (“Is it dry yet? Hmm, what about now?”) until I finally deemed it to be Time. I pulled them off the blockers, put them on aaahhhhh so soft sooo soft and wandered off through the dim early morning light with the camera to find Chris. (It was seven in the morning. I’d been up with Ben and the socks for an hour. It was like Christmas. I’d stand at the foot of the bed, willing Chris to wake up so he could take a picture.)
I found him in Ben’s nursery, building a castle with a garage out of blocks. I sat up on the sofa and it was a kind of sunlight-beaming-through-the-clouds-and-angels-singing kind of moment. The light came up over the houses across the street and streamed in through the nursery windows. My poor socks, which had only ever been photographed in the light of a sofa-side compact fluorescent bulb at 11:30 at night, were being blessed by the universe.
We like them.
Know something funny? This whole process began as a lark, inspired by a blog that I read. Knitting the socks was a challenge and it took most of the conscious free moments I had in each day. (That’s conscious _and_ free, not conscious-free.) This means that I have not read any blogs other than this one for two weeks. I don’t know how The Harlot is doing on her sweater, or how anyone else is doing. Now I get to go find out. But boy, what a lot I could do with the time I spend reading blogs…
Like this.
What are your sock blockers made of? If you don’t mind sharing with a fellow BG fan, that is…… What a creative idea. I just finished my first sock (after knitting for over forty years!), and really don’t want to pay an arm and a leg for something that performs such a basic task.
P.S. Lovely socks, too!
I can’t remember exactly, but I think K made the sock blockers out of a sheet of foamcore board (the kind with styrofoam sandwiched between two sheets of cardboard.) The process was something like this:
1. Trace your right and left feet (side view) on the foamcore and mark which is which.
2. Trace a wider area aroud each tracing, because your feet aren’t flat.
3. Cut out the bigger area you traced, taking care to keep the curves as smooth as possible (no snagging!)
4. Put masking tape around the edges to make them even smoother.
Hope that helps!
Yup, that’s it. That’s all I did. I did find, however, that the ankle was a little big–the rest of it blocked beautifully, but the ankle stretched a bit. So if you use this method make the ankle a bit more slender in relation to the rest of the blocker. Good luck!