Traveling Socks

Pretty cool, don’t you think? “You put your right foot in…” First off, I didn’t knit all these socks. (And we weren’t doing the hokey pokey.) I knit about two inches of each sock. To be more precise, that would be except for the one pair of socks that includes about four inches of my knitting.

These are “Traveling Socks.” We’re quite sure they’ll do plenty of traveling on our feet. But these socks got a head start on their travels by traveling around while being knitted.

We are eight members of the Canada Creek Ranch Yarn Therapists. Canada Creek Ranch is a 13,500 acre family-oriented private club in Michigan for hunting, fishing, and outdoor recreation. And the Yarn Therapists are knitters and crocheters who share the club’s enthusiasm for outdoor activities. The Ranch says “we are quiet, peaceful, and serene.” True. Except maybe as we struggle with crochet provisional castons or buttonhole bands.

That foot on the far left in the bottom row is my right foot. I know that because I know my own sock and I particularly know my own bunion. Here’s a look at my pair and then I’ll explain more about traveling socks.

I knit the ribbing and the toe in that sweet copper color, along with the red section just before the toe decreases. These are Linda’s socks:

I knit the third section from the top. When you see that bright orange/gold (or the copper), that’s my knitting. Eventually, I had to break into some red though.

Ah, I promised I’d explain how we managed this and then I detoured into Linda’s socks. At one of our twice-monthly meetings, everyone who wanted to participate received a brown paper bag containing a drawing of a sock divided into 8 sections. Each section was labeled with the name of another yarn therapist. The bag included two strips of ribbon to be used as stitch holders. That’s because we are mostly paranoid about letting our personal favorite sock needles out of our sight.

We each knit the ribbing of our own socks. We decided to fudge some on the gauge and asked everyone to use US size 2 needles. When we finished our two inches, we put the stitches on the ribbon, tucked the unfinished socks in the bag and, at the next meeting we passed our bag to the next knitter slated to work on the socks. Nobody was allowed to see their own socks until they came back to them for the home stretch at the toe.

Here’s Viki’s:

Here’s Janet’s:

Life happens. So sometimes folks had to miss a meeting. We passed along brown paper bags in some weird places, including the parking lot by the airport at the corner of County Roads 459 and 624. Wouldn’t it have been a hoot if the sheriff’s department thought they’d sniffed out something fishy and searched our paper bags?  “Officer, where’s your probable cause…we’re two white-haired older women…we’re not doing anything suspicious…oh, heck, sure…go ahead and search.”

Because I’ve gotten confused about which are whose, here’s Lenore’s, Sandi’s, Cindy’s, and Susan’s (in no particular order):

We relaxed about gauge. We didn’t try to control yarn selection except to say “use sock yarn.”  We didn’t follow a set pattern. We are a mix of experienced and inexperienced sock knitters. And still we are each surprised and delighted with our socks. Our recent reveal was way cool!

7 thoughts on “Traveling Socks

  1. This blog is perfect! Gives us all a chance to see how different our socks came out. I love it! And with your storytelling skills Noreen I felt like I was experiencing this for the first time! Or maybe it’s my memory issues! Lol!

  2. Okay Glasshead, I just now got around to reading March’s blog and it ended with you weeping. Dry those tears Missy! You were able to wear some pretty incredible hats this month! Wow was I impressed! And those mittens! The first ones listed were my favorite. Now Glasshead, not having any hands? That’s something to cry about!

  3. @Linda…our group wrote the story, so it was an easy one to tell. And thanks so much for reading other entries on my blog. Don’t fret about Glasshead. She’s a big time whiner!

  4. @Jeanne…my knitting group had a great time with this project! Thanks for visiting my blog!

  5. Finally got time to read your blog on our traveling socks – yay! You did a fantastic job writing this up Noreen; it was fun to read and I loved the pictures of our socked feet and everyone’s socks. It was a fun side project and, as you pointed out, a great way to use up bits of left over sock yarn. I also loved that some people knitted socks for the first time! Always awesome to have that group support! Thank you again to Lenore for organizing this project 🙂

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