knitting socks - past, present + future

Hello lovely friends and welcome to the first Friday Foxs Lane of the new year. Have you had a nice week? I hope so.

Things here have been pretty quiet. Outside, we've been mowing and planting and eating out of the garden and irrigating and trying to get the lines out of the overgrown orchards. Inside we've been reading, and knitting, and cleaning up our house, and watching lots of movies at night. Our days are long and mostly we don't come in for dinner until well after eight, but still often I'll lie in bed in the middle of the night and wonder where the time went.

I adore summer: The fruit, the garden, the salads, the clothes, the holidays, the heat and the way the washing dries so fast on the line that I can actually see the bottom of the laundry basket.

Not very summery though are socks. Especially woolly, thick, hand knit socks. But just because they're not suitable to the current season, doesn't mean I can stop myself from knitting them.

So here it is, my early January 2017 version of socks - past, present and future;

Socks past are a pair I knitted for Bren back in April of last year. The blue was yarn that I bought at Loop London on our Europe trip and I can't remember what the grey for the heels, toes and cuffs was.

I called them Farmer Boy socks and true to their name my boy wore them under his boots, on the farm and often.

After many washes and many, many wears the farmer boy socks tore at the heels and ended up in the mending basket. (I suspect the grey yarn was pure wool and didn't have any nylon for toughness.) Now I don't know what it's like at your house, but here the mending basket is a bit of a black hole. Once something finds its way in, it may never be seen again. After all, how dull is mending when you can start something shiny and new?!

And so it was with the farmer boy socks until yesterday. With his birthday coming up tomorrow and talk of a new pair of socks, we started discussing the old. I got up on the chair and had a bit of a rummage through the mending department and pulled them out.

My friend Bria had once emailed me the instructions for how to repair a hand-knit sock with a knit-in-place patch, which I'd filed under 'one day', and what do you know, for some unknown reason today is that day. So in between loading photos and thinking of words, I'm knit-mending those socks.

The wooden darning mushroom was my grandmother's and looks like it had quite a busy life.

And so it seems socks past may become socks present once more. Hopefully.

Details for the Farmer Boy socks are here.

Repairing a hand-knit sock with a knit-in-place patch.

Socks present, after much sewing in of the millions of ends, are the colourful fair isle socks. How cool do they look inside out.

I'm sure I've blogged the story of Anna, my sock knitting clarinet teacher from my teen-age years, as my inspiration for learning to knit socks all these years later. But the truth is that Anna used to knit these intricate fair isle socks filled with colourful patterns and pictures and words. The ones that stick in my mind had houses and trees and flowers and birds and butterflies. While I am still a long way away from crafting anything so technically brilliant, these socks make me feel like I am heading in the right direction.

Details for the All the patterns - all the colours socks are here.

And socks future, will be my farmer boy's birthday socks. Yep, I know the colours are incredibly similar to the last pair but he chose them and I'm going with them. They will be pretty plain, but there will be a bit of colour-work at the top, so I'm happy.

And with that I'll wish you a wonderful weekend and a fabulous second week of the new year.

But just before you go please tell me what you've been making, or mending, or meaning to.
I'd love to know.


Love Kate xx

PS. It's been suggested that I change my blog name to Soxs Lane, what do you think? Haha!