Socks

 I am thinking about socks a lot these days.  I will be at Stash Needle Art Lounge (see them here) in April to teach the fine art of knitting handmade socks.  I'm really looking forward to teaching again.  And socks are great fun to knit - they are small portable projects, great for taking on trips to keep yourself amused in airport lounges and hotel rooms and even on road trips - if you are in the passenger seat. 

Nancy Bush in her wonderful book “Folk Socks – The history and techniques of handknitted footwear, says  that “no human apparel has been more taken for granted than the sock”, and I think this is very true. 

   We pull on our socks, shove our suitably covered feet into our shoes, boots or runners, and jump to our feet, ready to go.  When the heels and toes wear out, get holes in them, become thin – they are pitched into the garbage without a thought.  Socks are disposable.   Socks can have a sad life, and yet…

What if that sock is handmade, knitted with soft yarn specifically measured for your foot?  What if those measurements have been taken, colours chosen,  construction begun, not just once but twice, because you can’t run on one sock, and the brand new handmade pair of cozy socks is carefully presented to you in love – what then?.   That would “knock your socks off” wouldn’t it? 

 Let’s “pull our socks up” and think about socks in an entire different way.  

Some of the first socks were found, surprisingly intact, in Egyptian tombs. Look at the photo of these ancient socks in Mary Thomas's book, which apparently were dyed red, knit in a woman's size, and they have a split  toe to accomodate the wearer's sandals.

 In her 1938 book “Mary Thomas’s Knitting Book she pegs the beginnings of knitting  in 

Arabia then brought to Egypt  and spread to Europe along the trade routes,  probably back as far as the 3^rd century.  But no one knows for sure when the penny dropped and the first knitted sock was born. 

This gorgeous painting of the Virgin Mary, entitled "The Visit of the Angels" is by the Master Bertram and thought to be painted between 1390 and 1400. It was originally in the Buxtehuder Abbey in Europe.  Notice Mary is knitting a garment on four needles! 

I suppose none of this matters much, unless you happen to enjoy wearing hand knit socks, or like to knit them. Socks are pretty much constructed in the same way today as they have been since the beginning - knit in the round on a set of 4 or 5 needles with points at both ends.

First the stitches are cast on, then divided onto four needles, and then joined up, looking like a square, the stitches carried on four needles, knit using the fifth needle making a tube. Knit from the top to the toe, socks are divided into 4 sections, first the leg - the straight tube,, then the heel flap, short rows to turn the heel and make a joint in the tube, then knitting the foot from the heel to the toe and rounding the toe off to finish.

One of the products that helped propel sock knitting into the 21^st century, is computer dyed yarn, those lovely yarns that when knitted in the round make their own fair isle, or striped pattern.  The problem with these yarns is that they are addicting.  Its past midnight but you can’t quit until you see what colour is going to turn up next and what pattern it will make in the sock. 

Vancouver Island watercolour artist Nell Anderson painted the sock knitting chicken for me a few years ago.

it makes me smile every time I look at it.  Celebrate the sock and have warm feet.