New Socks, Underway!

 After finishing my Dad's socks for Father's Day, I took a short break from knitting.  Not because I wanted to, but because there were so many things vying for my time (like prepping the farm for a farm sitter while DH and I were on our big family vacation in July).

However, I knew I wanted to take a knitting project with me on the long drive to and from Myrtle Beach, so two days before we hit the road, I went into my stash of fingering yarn and grabbed out a blue tonal skein.  Why blue?  Because for over a year one of the things on my Want To Make list has been a pair of blue socks for myself.  

At the time I wrote that list, I didn't have a specific pattern in mind, but now I did.  Because in late June I had been working ten minutes here and twenty minutes there on darning some of my handknit socks that had worn holes in the balls of the feet or the heels (or both!) and in that pile of socks to be mended I found my Cadence socks.  

I had knit these socks ten years ago, and they had been darned at least once since then.  Unfortunately, when I gave them a good look this time, I had to admit that they were just too worn out to darn again.  It would be more like trying to knit new heels and soles for them.  And I definitely didn't have the time, talent, or enough of the original yarn left to attempt that.  So I sadly said goodbye to them.

All of which meant that my next socks, my blue socks, would most definitely need to be knit using the Cadence pattern that I so loved.

With my pattern chosen, and yarn in hand, I cast on the first sock.  Knit two rows of the cuff, then packed yarn, needles, pattern, and row counter away in my travel bag so it would be handy on my trip. 

On the way to Myrtle Beach I didn't get a whole lot of knitting time, as we had K3 and Faline riding with us.  I managed to get through the cuff and the first chart for the leg.  I also knit a little (an inch?) off and on while at Myrtle Beach some of the times I was hanging out on the balcony having a breather from all my vacation-mates.

On the way home, it was just DH and I in the truck (Faline rode with her parents and brothers, who were marathon driving straight back to Michigan.  K3, along with Toad and Rascal, stayed in South Carolina visiting their other grandparents--K2's parents) and I got a ton of knitting done.

When we arrived back home, I had the leg about three-quarters knit.

Then it sat for a week, untouched, while I scrambled around trying to catch up on housekeeping and farm work post-vacation.  Recently I have worked on it a couple of brief spells and currently I have finished the length of the leg and am about half-way through the heel flap.  

I have no illusions of any great spans of time to knit on this in the near future.  If I can have both socks done by my own birthday (December), that would be great.  But more than likely I will be setting this project aside later this month and working on a different knitting project instead.

Because Faline, seeing me knitting while we were on the road to our vacation destination, dropped hints in the way that only a five year old can do.  "Amma, I don't have any socks knit by you.  I like pink.  That would be a good color for knit socks."

Her birthday is mid-November.  I have at least one skein of fingering yarn in pink.  If I focus my knitting time on it, I could probably whip up a pair of youth size 1 pink socks by then.