Kare's Knitting Adventure: My First Socks (San Antonio, TX)

It's recently dawned on me that I've actually managed to mix and mingle my three hobbies: knitting (obviously!), travelling and photography :D

Those who know me know that I LOVE to travel, and I'm not talking about the travelling that involves sitting on a beach sipping Mai-Tai's. I'm all about the adventure, roaming around cities, hiking and experiencing different cultures. And each trip is made better with exploring these places with my husband of 3 years, Jimmy. Some of the most memorable trips have been backpacking around Europe during my university days, skydiving in New Zealand (for my honeymoon!), seeing Everest in Tibet and hiking the short hike in high altitude to Everest Base Camp #1, and completing the Inca Trail hike in Peru.

Photography has always been a interest of mines, but I didn't splurge on a DSLR until I planned our trip to Tibet. I view the world differently after seeing it through a lens. All I can say is, the world is a beautiful place full of wonderful textures, colours and emotion.

So how do this two hobbies tie in with knitting? Photography is easy - I love photographing the things that I knit :) And travelling? Well, it all began with a business trip to San Antonio. My work had been sending me to San Antonio quite a bit during the first half of this year. Travelling alone can get quite boring, so I would always look up places to go to before I left town, which mainly consisted of shopping/outlet malls. This time around, I thought it would be fun to check out a yarn store in San Antonio. I headed to Yarnivore, a yarn store located just outside downtown San Antonio. I ended up buying a Kertzer "On Your Toes" sock yarn (75% Superwash Wool, 25% Nylon). So with this purchase, I started a little trend - to buy yarn from the difference places I travel to! So far, I've bought yarn in France and Peru :)

For socks, you want to stick to the superwash yarns - there are no special care instructions for these types of yarns, you can simply just throw it into the washing machine. Now there are two ways you can knit socks - from the toe-up or from the top-down. After doing some research online, I found I liked the toe-up method better. The biggest pros were the fact that you can try them on as you knit (so it is guaranteed to fit your foot perfectly) and if you run out of yarn, you just end up knitting shorter/ankle socks. Imagine running out yarn when you still have the toe to knit! Oh my!

The lady at Yarnivore told me about a really good free pattern from Knitpicks for toe-up socks. The pattern uses the magic loop method (where you knit two socks at the same time with a long circular needle), but at this point I felt it was a little too advanced for me and I ended up knitting once sock at a time. I have since been knitting using the magic loop method, but that will be for a later post :) I started these socks on DPNs (US3, 3.25mm). If you're going to knit one sock at a time, make sure to keep track of the number of rows you knit so you can make a matching second sock! :)

I started with a short-row cast-on, which took me awhile to get the hang of. I think it took at least 7 attempts until I got the sock started. The must frustrating part was the fact that once I started knitting the toes, the seam that was formed by the cast-on loosened, so I had this zig-zaggy hole right at the toe. I later gave up on trying to make the toe seam perfectly tight - you can easily fix this at the end when you stitch up the ends (just use the ends to "sew" the toe seam together). To bind off, I used the sewn bind-off, which is pretty simple. You'll just need a tapestry needle. Just make sure not to bind off too tightly or you might not be able to pull up your socks or it might cut off your circulation! LoL yup, I made that mistake! That's ok! Mistakes are part of the learning process!

The hardest part of knitting socks (and following this pattern) is the cast-on/first few rows for the toes and the heel. Just make sure you pay close attention to these parts of the pattern. Try not to get too frustrated. For my first pair of socks, I actually knit 3 socks, because I found out after knitting my second sock that I make a mistake on the heel portion of the first sock. Oops!! haha :)

And thus my obsession of knitting socks began! Here are a few pics of the first pair of socks (the green one) plus other socks I've knit using this pattern: