So I’m going to start this post with a confession: I have never knit socks before.
I have wanted to knit socks before; thought about knitting socks, looked at patterns for knitting socks, drooled over sock yarn and even bought a few skeins. Those skeins are currently sitting on top of my yarn stash, a haunting reminder of my conviction to knit socks which I have yet to carry through.
Ironically, I have knit Christmas stockings before and even found the whole process rather enjoyable. It was this experience that convinced me to get a skein of sock yarn, certain that if one is like the other than surely I’d find knitting socks fun! And yet the conviction has carried me no farther on my sock knitting journey than another ball of yarn on top of my ever growing yarn pile.
I’ve tried to figure out the road block on my sock journey and dismissed possibilities one by one. It’s not the idea of using double pointed needles; as much as their not my favorite type of needle I can use them just fine. While this may have given me pause when I first started knitting they no longer stop me from trying a project. It’s not the fine yarn or how many stitches it will need. I’ve made too many blankets for that to cause me problems. Finally I narrowed down the problem: the math required to fit a sock to a foot.
I’m good at math, and what’s more I like math. This is a girl who spent nights she couldn’t sleep in middle school making math equations out of the time on her digital clock. (I do not know why middle school me did this, just that making the two numbers on either side of the clock equal the same amount was fun. Looking back on my childhood I am slowly coming to have peace with the revelation that I was a weird kid). Math should not be stopping me from knitting.
And yet it is. I don’t want to have to measure my own foot to make sure the socks I make fit. I don’t want to have to fiddle with the gauge or the needle sizes or the yarn to make sure it matches what is needed in the pattern. The thought of having to make sure it all works is exhausting.
You don’t have this same problem with scarves, you just knit it until you like the length and then stop.
I have been dragging my feet on making myself socks but I believe I have finally found the one thing that will motivate me to complete the hurdle: a more complicated project.
There is nothing more motivating than having something you really want to do and then putting a slightly inconvenient road block in front of it. If I can sit down and find a complicated project with more math involved then once it’s done I should look at making a sock and go “well, that’s not so hard!”
Is it logical? Not really. Is it an unnecessarily complicated way to motivate me to do something I already want to do? Definitely. but sometimes, as you get older and start puzzling out how your own brain works, you find unconventional ways to talk yourself through your own quirks.
