That darn sock.

I had my first experience with darning socks last week. The pair that I made my mom for Christmas had a hole on the bottom, near the heel. There are three possible explanations for this:

 

1. I used cheap yarn, which is therefore less durable.

 

2. My mom loves these socks so much and wears them so often that it's not surprising they developed a hole.

 

3. My sock knitting skills are sorely lacking, thus resulting in a lower quality pair of socks.

 

I'm going to go with numbers 1 and 2, okay? :) Mom is definitely a sock person and does wear these all the time, whether she actually loves them or not.

 

Before:

 

And after.

It's not very pretty, but I'm curious to see how it holds up. I started off using this tutorial, but I was having a hard time making duplicate stitches around the somewhat felted edges of the hole. So then I switched to the weaving method (like in this video). It was still time-consuming, but much easier.

Speaking of socks, I knitted my mom another pair for Mother's Day.

This was some of the fastest knitting I've ever done, you guys. Mother's Day snuck up on me this year, and I couldn't get to Hobby Lobby until a week before. I started these socks on Saturday night and finished them on the following Saturday, the day before Mother's Day. I was weaving in the ends at 9:30 that night. It was a miracle that they were finished in a week...my previous two pairs took 2 or 3 weeks.

I had quite a few Boy Meets World marathons while knitting these. I also watched the entire first season of Call the Midwife. {Oh my goodness, I love that show! BBC is ridiculously brilliant. Call the Midwife is hilarious and heartbreaking and shocking and a bit wow-maybe-I-shouldn't-watch-this-until-after-I-have-had-children. :) Chummy is probably my favorite so far.}

This was also my first time using self-striping yarn. That stuff is awesome. (One sock is slightly darker than the other because they're different dye lots. These were the only two skeins left of this color, so I had to make do.)

Oh, and I just realized that I never posted these gloves. I finished them back at the beginning of April. I make a lot of fingerless gloves, but my hands (fingers included) tend to get cold in the winter while I'm driving. I was really nervous about making full gloves, but they turned out much easier than I expected!

These are a pattern modified from one that the American Red Cross published during World War II. I thought that was pretty neat. I started out making the modified women's version, but they were way too tight. So I switched to the men's version...and they're still slightly snug. Are my hands really that big? Good grief.

{As for the title of this post, I couldn't help but think of That Darn Cat!, which is one of my favorite 60s live action Disney movies.}

Until next time,