A Good Start...

As I mentioned yesterday, I'm participating in the 26 Pair Plunge, which runs from 1 July 2012 through 30 June 2013.  In that time, we're challenged to finish 26 pairs of knitted or crocheted socks.  They can be things we already have started, or things we start new for the challenge.

So far, I've finished six pairs for this new Plunge year.  Here they are:

I have some more in progress that I should be able to finish up pretty soon.  But I really want to cast on a couple of shawls that have been calling to me....

Next week, I'll talk about the quilting I've done so far this year.  Have a great weekend.

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The Rest of the 52 Pair Plunge Socks

Here are the last two pairs of socks I knitted for the 52 Pair Plunge. 

I wasn't intending to participate in a Plunge this year (July 2012-June 2013), because I was looking forward to knitting whatever I wanted to knit, shawls and cowls and mitts and hats and who knows what.  But I hate to be "left out," so I had to join in again.  But this time, I'm just doing the 26 Pair Plunge, so it won't be the same crazy pace.  And if I don't complete it, I really don't care.  I just wanted to be in on the fun and play along.  I've already made some good progress, though.  I'll show you that tomorrow.

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My Socks So Far This Year

Here are the socks I did for myself for the second half of the 52 Pair Plunge, which ran from 1 July 2011 to 30 June 2012.  I've already shown the socks I knitted in the first half of the year, and two days ago I showed two pairs I made for myself, which were related to the pair I made for my mom.  This is the rest of the socks I made for myself between the first of the year and the end of June:

Apparently, I can't add all the pictures I'd like to here.  So I'll post the last two that didn't show up here in another post to follow this one.

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Socks for Carrie

The only other pair of gift socks I've made so far this year was actually started back in the summer of 2010.  This was a kit (pattern + yarn + commemorative stitch marker) which was sold as a fundraiser for the Susan G. Komen foundation by Knitters Brewing Company.  I didn't want to make pink ribbon socks, but Wendy from KBC posted a list of awareness ribbon colors.  I saw that purple was the awareness ribbon color for Cystic Fibrosis, and that was it.  My friend Carrie and her husband lost a daughter to CF some years back.  It wasn't so much that I thought she needed more awareness of CF, but it was a way to honor the life and memory of her daughter.  I set these aside several times, as they're a bit complicated, and I needed to focus when I was working on them, not be watching TV or anything else at the same time.  I finished them in June, but didn't give them to Carrie until late July -- ironically just a day or two after her birthday, which I wasn't aware of until I gave them to her ;-)  Gotta love those happy accidents!  Anyhow, here they are, though the color's off a bit.  They're a lovely medium purple shade in real life:

It's not obvious from this photo, but up the center front and center back are the ribbon motifs.  Here's a picture where I turned them a bit to the front, trying to capture that:

Carrie liked them, and apparently her grandmother used to knit for her, so I struck a nice chord on several levels.  Win!

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Socks Because She Nagged Me...

So, my mom claimed she was jealous because my aunt got a pair of socks I made for her.  Last spring (I think it was in April), I was at my parents' house, to be there while she had heart surgery.  While I was there, I asked her what color socks she wanted, and she said "black or gray, they'll go with the most."  She didn't understand, that's like buying a painting because it matches your sofa.  Handknit socks are art for the feet!  Well, I told her "I'm NOT knitting black socks!" and didn't think much more about it.  But then I had to go to Jo-Ann fabrics for another reason, and I checked out their sock yarn, and found one that was self-striping in grays and cream.  I thought I could just about stand to work with that without getting bored to tears, so I bought it to make my mother's socks.  I cast them on, then kept putting them aside for more interesting projects.

I finally finished them in January, and sent them to her.  She received them on Monday, February 6.

I called her that Thursday, and she let me know that she'd gotten them and really liked them.  That was a good thing, because that Saturday morning (February 11), my dad called me to tell me that she'd died earlier that morning.  I had been expecting it some time in the next few years, but not that particular weekend.  Still, although we weren't close, we weren't estranged, and I'd spoken to her a few days earlier, so I didn't feel any of the regret that sometimes makes an unexpected death even more difficult to deal with.

When my dad called, I was finishing up these socks from leftovers:

Even after I finished them, I still had some of the gray yarn left, though I'd managed to use up all the pink, yellow and green.  So, I cast on toes of new socks with the rest of the gray, then used the rest of the yarn from the socks I made for my mom, and made these:

I only had a few inches of leg done when the "mom sock leftovers" ran out, so I continued with something from my stash that coordinated pretty well.  I call this project "Mom-mento mori," which is a variation on the term memento mori, which was an object (often a skull) intended to remind people of death and mortality.  In this case, it's more a reminder of my mother's life, and a way to feel connected to her.

My mother wasn't very old when she died, she'd turned 67 the previous October.  But she had a number of health issues that had developed in the last ten or so years, and she had smoked for more years than I'd been alive.  She quit in 2006 when she first got acutely ill, but had gone back to smoking a few years later.  She had about 5 years longer than anyone expected her to live, after how bad she was in '06, and they were mostly good years when she was able to do things she enjoyed.  She would have hated being an invalid, and from what my dad told me it sounds like her death was relatively quick and fairly painless.  So, there were a lot worse ways it could have happened.  The timing was a bit of a surprise, but we knew she wouldn't have another five years, probably.  I'm just glad I finished those socks and got them to her.

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Have You Missed Me?

It's been a really long time since I've posted, I know.  All I can say is that this year has been a series of things that have exploded in my face.

I've knitted a number of pairs of socks since my last post.  This time, I'll post the ones I've made for DH.  Then I'll post those I've made for others, and finally the ones I've made for myself.  So, since the beginning of  this year, DH has gotten seven new pairs of socks.  Here they all are:

I'm so glad that he doesn't want plain, boring black or blue or brown socks!  Of course, if he did, I wouldn't be knitting him socks, but would be buying them instead.  He loves the socks I knit, though, and he loves the wild ones best ;-)

Thanks for stopping by to play.  Come back again soon -- I promise to post more often!