Re-Visiting My Childhood With New Socks

When I was a small child we used to get hand me down clothes from our cousins out west.  I remember one particular time the hand me downs included some crazy hot pink and bright purple socks.  Oh how I adored those socks.  Pink and purple!!!!! What's not too love?

I'm pretty sure my older sister did not love them.  I'm pretty sure they were a bit of a horror to her imppecable eye for fashion and aesthetics.  I'm pretty sure she likely still questions both my fashion sense and my ability to distinguish colours because my very favourite outfit at the time was my red Royal Stewart kilt paired with either my pink or purple socks.  Of course she may have been on to something because my very favourite outfit in high school was a rather questionable combination of a shaker knit sweater, a fully gathered skirt with cabbage roses on it, grey wool socks and desert boots.

Not really sure what I was thinking on either occasion.  But whatever.  All that is in the past.  I like to think that I look somewhat more put together when I leave the house these days.  All that being said, I am pretty sure I actually squealed in delight a few months ago when I received a little surprise in the post from my friend, Sally and Plymouth Yarn's Neon Now in super bright pink and purple greeted me when I opened the envelope.  Squee!  It's like the best of my little kid socks all rolled into one fabulous ball of yarn!!!

I wanted a pattern that would be simple, yet not mind-numbingly boring to knit and would highlight the fun colours of the yarn rather than obscure them with fussy patterning.  What I chose was Anne Campbell's Show Off Stranded Socks.  My socks took me a month to knit only because I was busy with a test pair of socks that I'll show you when the pattern is released.  They're actually a really quick knit great for working on when you don't want to have to pay too much attention to what you're doing.  It's a four row pattern repeat that has two of the rows as stockinette.  Easy peasy!  The gusset method was yet another new technique for me, but nothing daunting about it.

I was ever so proud of my matching skills for my socks.  See how well everything lines up?  But while I was busily patting myself on the back I decided during the knitting of sock number two that I should really rip back sock one and do it a few rows longer because it really was on the verge of being annoyingly small on me.  No problem though.  Not with my matching prowess.  Except, well, something went amiss and now the tippity top of my toe (try saying that five times over quickly!) does NOT match.   Agggghhhhhh.  But, well, frankly I really don't care that it's off.  Well, actually I do, but not enough to rip out and try to rematch.  I could see that going absolutely no where fast.

So.  There you go!  Bright, fun, pink and purple socks that I can re-visit my childhood with.  It's not feeling like wooly sock weather right this moment with the sunshine and warm temperature, but come next winter, these are going to be a whole lot of fun on a dreary cold day!