Do I Have To?

There's a little problem happening with the socks.

I'm a pretty smart girl, but math is not my forte. Not at all. And the rapidly shrinking ball of yarn at my side caused me to, a few days ago, break my yarn, string sock one of Spina di Pesce onto waste yarn, and cast on for the second so that one sock would not end up significantly longer than the other.

Now, if I lived in a town, I would show you a picture of where we are right now. Instead, since it takes me a delicious three to four hours to upload one picture onto the internet (when it works at all), picture a sock knitted from the toe up, a neatly turned heel, gusset decrease, and about an inch or so of leg sitting to one side and on the other a toe and the start of one gussett.

The ball, though, is shrinking too quickly. Much too quickly. So quickly that I have been forced to do the math. I have 320 yards of my Digitessa yarn and 320 yards of my Spina di Pesce yarn. Two balls, two very different colors, two very different patterns. The original yarn specification, Wollmeise Sockenwolle, has 575 yards. I thought, originally, that my normal needs for a pair of socks would reflect the needs of the pattern and that I would (if I used the Sockenwolle) have a huge chunk left over. But now I don't think so. And when I did the math...that's...255 yards of difference.

255 yards. Wow. That is a lot of yarn. And that would be why I am rapidly approaching the situation of...two nice anklets. Two anklets instead of the glory of beautiful Yarnissima socks. I have been knitting almost all my life, Knitting for two years or so, and I should know better than to screw this up so royally.

I may, and I say may, because I am knitting until the yarn runs out just to see what it looks like, end up frogging both these delicious socks and use the yarn for a normal sock pattern. But I really don't want to.

These are beautiful socks, the kind that come across your needles once in a lifetime. I want to wear these socks, especially because I have already messed around with fixing the gauge problems and working out needles sizes, and all the horror of learning to circular magic loop the whole thing...I have invested a lot in these socks, a lot. I have been working on both of them throughout the Christmas holidays and now...to say goodbye after all the work I put into them...I don't know if I can take it.

I may just have to let them sit in a basket half-finished until I cast on with enough yarn to make it happen right. But we aren't there yet. I may just have slightly shorter pairs of each of these socks, and that is okay. I just don't want to have them be ankle socks, not with all the strain that I have put into them.

I want to be able to pull up the leg of my jeans in order to show unsuspecting strangers what I do with all my spare time (simultaneously explaining why it is that I am still single) and show them the glory of these socks. I want to do this without having to remove shoes. I have noticed, if you do that, people tend to inch away from you, or walk away, or run, thinking something is wrong deep within your fractured psyche. And since I would then be without shoes or shoe, I can't really run after them without messing up the socks.

I have thought that out far, far too much.