Well let me begin with my thank you's. First a big thank you to Ravelry http://www.ravelry.com/ and all of the informative forum posters there. I was able to find resources and links to everything I needed without even having to post a question. And thank you to Lion Brand Yarn and their plethora of free patterns http://www.lionbrand.com/, YouTube http://www.youtube.com/, KnitPicks http://www.knitpicks.com/knitting.cfm, and especially Kelley Petkun of KnitPicks for her excellent sock knitting series with very plainly laid out instructions and descriptions http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHQkfkI9P7s&feature=related.
With all of that help at my fingertips I know how to knit socks! My very first project was a fairly seamless success which resulted in one almost perfect sock. Yes, only one and only "almost" perfect. I chose not too knit a partner sock to my first for several reasons. Not in any particular order I A: wouldn't have had enough yarn to make both socks the same height, B: Didn't particularly care for the color/stripe pattern this yarn produced, and C: Don't care for the stitch pattern of k3p1 for my socks. Since this was the first time I knitted socks I wasn't aware that k3p1 would produce this pattern,(although as a person who does knit I should have realized, oh well). So armed with a pattern that I found at the Lion Brand website and Kelley's videos on YouTube I began my project. At this point I was still afraid of the difficulties ahead and had cartoon like visions of me entangled in knotted wads of yarn with a tiny sock toe on a bent knitting needle, however Kelley's assurance that socks are easy along with her thorough demonstrations put me at ease early on in the process, (which is why it now surprises me that I stuck to that pesky k3p1 pattern). The tube section went very smoothly and I was able to move away from the computer and work in the comfort of my living room, for the heel flap and gusset however I had to watch the videos a few times before I got it right, and at one point had to rip out the whole heel section and start over. But no worries, I managed to get all of the stitches back on the needles and persevered. At this point I was able to see basically what my sock was going to look like and was very self confident in my ability to have a finished piece that not only resembled a sock but would work as one if put on a foot. So that evening as I read the pattern directions for shaping the toe, yes, I felt confident enough to undertake the toe shaping on my own since I knew from the gusset part why you k2tog on one side and ssk on the other, (right now I feel like such a knitty pro using those terms), so why not get comfortable in the living room and watch a movie with the guy. And it all went very smoothly, until it came time to close up the toe. At this point we were half way through the movie and I was not going to tell the beau, "Hey, could you pause the movie so I can go learn how to close a sock toe", (I'm sure he would have, but still), I had no idea what a "kitchner stitch was and I just knew that I was mere minutes away from having a whole, real sock! Oh the dilema. Well, the side table next to the chair I was in happens to be the table under which I keep a bunch of books, and luck be a lady my encyclopedia of stitch work happened to be amongst them. So I looked in the knitting section and saw only one technique that seemed fitting and it wasn't called the "kitchner" stitch, but it's a really old book so maybe they just didn't call it that back then. It was a basic explanation on knitting two pieces together, and as I was doing it I knew it wasn't the right way, but hey, it was only 8 stitches and by that time I was almost done, and I wasn't going to be wearing this sock anyway, so I did it. And just like that I had a sock! So many times I've heard so many people talk about how much more wonderful hand knit socks are to store bought ones and boy oh boy are they right. You can feel the love and happy energy that went into them, or it, as my situation was. For this I did actually make the guy pause the movie and he dutifully tried my hand knit sock on, he also sincerely agreed that it did feel better on his foot than another sock before it, and being the good guy that he is he continued to wear the sock for the rest of the evening telling me periodically just how great a sock it was.
Now I have to backtrack a little to explain the "almost" perfect result. While I was within the last few rows of the gusset section of my sock I ended up with an uneven number of stitches on either side of my heel. I thought that perhaps I accidentally decreased one stitch on the side that had 1 too few stitches in a row where you don't decrease on either side therefore I was off by one on that side. Rather than rip it all out again I figured it would be noticeably wonky if I just decreased by one in a non-decrease row on the other side. So that's what I did and it wasn't wonky at all, Phewww. However while the guy was wearing the sock I wanted to examine it closer on a foot and while doing so I noticed that I dropped a stitch at the beginning of the heel shaping section. If I had knit a pair this would have totally ruined my evening because once the socks were washed the dropped stitch would have ran, (sort of like a run in pantyhose only huger), and that would have made them not so wonderful. I found solace in the fact that there is only one and they won't be worn, I decided to put it in a shadow box and hang it on the wall in my studio, (after hand washing it of course.
So now I have one lovely sock with only minor flaws and I am ready to knit a pair!
