Simple

I’m back from my whirlwind adventures around London and parts of southern England. I had a swell time, I bought a little bit of yarn (I’ll go into more detail on that for a later post), and I finished some projects while I was away. I went on a big finishing kick for a while, which is good, because now I have some deadline projects coming up. It’s a cycle, you see.

One of the projects I finished on my vacation were my simple socks, begun out of a necessity for a simple, small, portable project that I could take with me everywhere. No lace, so I didn’t have to read a chart. No colorwork or cabling, so I didn’t have to drag a bunch of yarn with me or make sure I had a spare needle for the cable parts. I could just knit and knit and knit and be done.

I used Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock in Black Purl, which I’d had for a couple of years and had just been languishing, awaiting the right pattern. I like to think that I went with the right choice, to let the colors do their own magic and not fight with a fiddly, color-obscuring pattern. I cast on 60 stitches, worked a 2×2 twisted rib (only working the back loop of the knit stitches), and then worked in Stockinette stitch for a certain amount of rows (no, I’m not big on measuring things in general; yes, this has bitten me in the bum a few times). Eye of partridge heel flap, standard gusset decreases and a wedge toe, and Bob’s your uncle, I have a new pair of socks.

I finished those on Thursday, while we were out touring Oxford, the Cotswolds, and Straford-on-Avon, and I wore them on Friday while we wandered around the South Bank and Tower of London. Hooray, new socks!

By the by, should you happen to find yourself carousing the area of Oxford or the Cotswolds, keep an eye out for the bit of my soul that got left behind. I may need it one day.