First things first

Always check to make sure you have enough yarn for two socks before you start knitting.*sigh*

Let’s take as our starting point some classically styled booties.

Then let’s move on to knee-high booties, for those babies who always manage to disengage themselves from their footwear.

These socks help babies express their inner Wicked Witches of the East.

Or maybe their inner monsters?

If you’re a sock knitter, you may especially enjoy these baby booties made with leftover sock yarn. Best of all, there’s no seaming whatsoever!

The person who wrote that pattern then upped the cuteness ante with these munchkin slippers, also made with leftover sock yarn and sized for newborn feet. Again, no seaming!

These are made from worsted-weight yarn,

Prefer your baby booties to come in mindless-knitting versions? Check out these slippers, formed from simple squares.

At this site, you enter some pieces of information (needle size, gauge, ankle circumference, type of heel desired) and get a step-by-step pattern for knitting socks.

Most sock knitters I know already have a regular/vanilla sock pattern they like to use, so maybe this is nothing new to most of you. I do like how you get a one-page pattern that’s easy to tote around. I think a printout would also be useful to file away if you’re made socks for a particular person, so you can have a record of what you did.

This sock pattern is touted as something “for men,” but really, anyone could wear diamonds in their shoes.

Here are some knitted slippers made with sock yarn, knitted slippers made with chunky yarn, a whole family’s worth of knitted-and-fulled slippers, and cute duck slippers for wee toes.

These Tatami Socks (from Judy Sumner’s Knitted Socks East and West) can be found on the Storque (Etsy’s handmade blog), where you can either download a PDF (look for the link in the introductory paragraphs) or follow the instructions right on the page. Most sock patterns strike me as too “fussy,” but I do like these and may give them a try soon.

These yoga socks are intended to warm your feet while leaving your toes and heels free for gripping. I wonder if the knitted surface would raise your toes from the mat just enough for them to lose their gripability. I also wonder how slippery these socks themselves would be–or if they’d be a good solution for people who get sweaty (and slippery) feet during their practice.

I know that legwarmers aren’t technically footwear, but legs are attached to feet, so I figure that’s close enough. These legwarmers have a lovely cable detail (from a scarf that’s been on my to-knit list forever…). And here are some super stretchy legwarmers knit out of worsted weight yarn (which means that if you want to knit some as a holiday gift, if you get cracking right now you might actually get them done on time).

And finally, just in time for the holiday season, elf shoes. The pattern sizes range from infant to adult, so you’ll definitely find one to suit your needs. Why should all the cute knitted shoes be for kids only? Adults need some elf-shoe goodness, too!

(Every time I come across a cute pattern for felted slippers, I think, “They look fun, but they’d be too slippery on my wood floors.” Suede soles are one solution, but they are outrageously expensive. Here’s a far cheaper solution: use silicone caulk on the soles.)

It’s taken me a few days to recover from all of those wild Pi Day festivities (okay, not really), but here I am with a whole bunch of good news!

News the first: I just had my car’s annual inspection this morning, and my little 1993 Saturn SL1 (yes, it’s official: I drive a beater) gets to live for another year! Yippee! I’m not looking forward to the expense of replacing this one when it’s no longer (legally) drivable. And I just love my little car, which has traveled to both coasts and back again several times since I bought it new.

News the second: I knit these socks for my friend Valerye for her birthday. They arrived a day late (she lives in Australia, and it’s hard to gauge how long international mail takes these days), but she didn’t mind at all—she thinks of late gifts as just prolonging the birthday celebration. She loves them! And they fit, too—no small thing, considering I don’t know her shoe size. I’ve never even seen her feet, since we’ve never actually met. We’ve been pen pals for sixteen years. Wow.

News the third: My garden is already off to a great start!* A couple of weeks ago we had a break in the cold weather. It was one of those freakishly warm days when you see pretty much everyone outside and hear lawnmowers revving throughout the neighborhood. Sylvia and I took advantage of the day to clean out our garden beds. We found several wiggly earthworms (which she enjoyed holding in her hands before finding a nice patch of dirt for them), cleared off dead leaves, and set up stakes for our peas and other climbers.

Yesterday, on St. Patrick’s Day, we planted our pea seeds—as instructed by Mike McGrath. Once we find the staple gun (it’s somewhere in this house…) we’ll set up trellis netting on the stakes, and those climbing peas will be able to go nutso!

News the fourth: On Saturday, the three of us attended a regional theater production in Old City, Philadelphia, of A Year with Frog and Toad. Wow. I am pretty sure that this is just about the best show (professional or amateur) I have ever seen. This particular production was terrific, but the show itself is just utterly sweet and charming and well-paced and cleverly structured. It’s based, as you can probably guess, on Arnold Loebel’s famous Frog and Toad stories.

The best part? Watching Sylvia’s almost-four-year-old face just light up while watching the show. Since Saturday, we’ve been listening to the soundtrack pretty much nonstop. And she’s got Jan and me doing pretend play with her based on the stories. Usually, she likes to be “the snail with the mail” or “the red bird.” I’m usually cast (she is the casting director, of course) as Toad, and Jan is usually “the blue bird.” On Sunday morning, she asked me to show her how to write “Dear Toad,” then she copied it onto a piece of paper, then—as “the snail with the mail”—very, very slowly delivered it to me.

News the fifth: On Monday I went back to Philly to meet an old friend (and his fiancee) from Oregon. They live in Portland now but are in New Jersey visiting her family for a few days. Mike and I met when I was doing my fieldwork and he was doing his doctoral research in marine biology and ecology. We kept in touch but this was the first time in ten years we’d seen each other. We met up at our favorite Chinese vegetarian/vegan restaurant in Chinatown. Yum!

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*Sylvia is taking a picture here with her “new” camera (my old point-and-shoot), which she got for Christmas. She is quite the shutterbug. It’s fascinating to look at the photos and catch a glimpse of the world through her eyes.

Last Sunday (just over a week ago), the three of us did a day trip up to New York (about a two or two-and-a-half-hour drive for us) to attend a one-year-old’s birthday party at Shea Stadium. We left our house at 7:30 in the morning and had parked at the stadium lot by 9:30.*

I love New York City. I don’t think I would ever want to live there (unless I were filthy stinking rich enough to afford a home larger than a closet), but it’s a magical place to visit. Coming into the city early on a weekend morning is my favorite: everything is so quiet, there’s no traffic, and the city has a lovely otherworldly quality.

We hopped on the subway and took it one stop to the end of the line, right in the middle of Chinatown in Flushing. My brother (who lives in Greenwich Village) met us there, and we had dim sum brunch together at a terrific vegetarian Chinese restaurant. We took the subway back to the stadium and got to the party location (a box for thirty people) about half an hour before the game started at 1:10.

Neither Jan nor I are sports fans, but we were able to explain the basics of baseball to Sylvia. Well, not all of them: we didn’t get past the part about the guy trying to hit a ball with a special stick. That’s all she wanted to know. She enjoyed watching the first inning and a half of the game, then mostly lost interest unless the organist was playing a song.

Mr. Met stopped by the box to say hello to the birthday boy and pose for pictures. Personally, I don’t know why all the little kids who were at the party didn’t freak out at the sight of him. Think about it: it’s a guy with a giant baseball for a head. If that isn’t horrifying, what is?

The Mets trounced the Cardinals in just two-and-a-half hours, so we were back on the road again by 4:30. Even though Sylvia napped in the car, by the time we got home around 7:30 we were all exhausted. We all fell out.

There’s a knitting connection to this post, though. The gray toddler socks I knit last month were a gift for the birthday boy (whose birthday isn’t really for another week). His mom’s birthday was on Sunday (though totally downplayed because it was her son’s party), and I gave her a pair of socks I’d completed the night before (racing against deadline!). I neglected to take a photo of them, so I’ll have to see if I can get one from her.

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*Of course it figures that when I finally make it to Queens (I’ve now visited all five boroughs—woot!), the one person I know there, Deborah (my awesome downstream pal in SP11), was busy running the NYC Half Marathon through Central Park and Times Square. I’m sure I’ll get a chance to meet her some day, though!

Well, maybe not rich, but the prize money could buy a lot of yarn.

The people responsible for Knitter’s magazine, XRX books, and the Stitches events are having a sock-design contest called Think Outside the Sox. The grand prize is $6,000, and the contest runs until 1 January 2009.

I wonder if knitting an oversized washcloth, folding it around my foot, then stapling it into place would qualify as a sock design. That’s pretty much all I could manage in the sock department, I think…

After cranking through one pair of toddler socks, I felt like I was on a roll. So I decided to knit another pair—this set for the soon-to-be one-year-old son of a friend. I used Wildfoote (in Master Grey), which was just lovely to work with. I knit the legs extra long, because socks almost never stay on babies’ feet once they are mobile (I used to find Sylvia’s little socks scattered throughout the house). Also, an extra-long leg can help prevent the “gap-itis” (particularly unpleasant in the winter, when it’s cold) that occurs when pant legs get scrunched up. These took just eight days to knit. I think I have toddler socks out of my system for now, though. My next sock project will be something for a grownup.

First, though I’m going to work on this sweater. I knit this a few years ago out of Baby Cashmerino left over from Sylvia’s baby blanket. I followed the Simple Boatneck pattern in Baby Knits for Beginners by Debbie Bliss.

Sylvia loves this sweater. She can put it on and take it off all by herself, and it has purple in it. Originally, the arms were way too long, but now they’re just right…and the body of the sweater is way too short. So I’m going to add some length to it by picking up stitches and knitting downward. It doesn’t have to look perfect (have you seen the seaming job I did on this thing?). Luckily, my friend Beth just happened to have two balls of Baby Cashmerino in a color that looks very much like one I used in the sweater!

I received a lot of wonderful comments to my post about which sock yarn to knit up first. (Thanks, everyone!) The suggestions were great, and I agreed with them all—even when they didn’t agree with each other!

I decided to start with the Trampoline yarn. This was given to me as a gift, and it definitely falls into the “these are so not my colors” category. But Sylvia really liked the yarn, so I set out to knit a pair of socks for her.

I followed the Ann Norling pattern for baby and kids socks. This pattern is written for three different gauges and is clear enough that even a sock n00b like me had no trouble following it (until I got to the Kitchener stitch instructions at the end, which made no sense to me, so I looked them up elsewhere).

These socks knit up pretty quickly, and I really enjoyed working on them! The best part? Sylvia is excited to wear them—as soon as her feet grow a little more and the weather cools. I think they’ll be just right for her this winter.

And now…on to the next pair of socks!

I have a bit of sock yarn in my stash.

To date, I’ve knit only three socks. I don’t have anything against socks—I just haven’t gotten around to starting a new pair. Considering the amount of sock yarn in my stash, though, my current non-sock-knitter status is getting to be embarrassing. (In all fairness, I should point out that about 90% of the yarn you see here was given to me by swap partners and friends.) So I’ve decided to cast on for some socks soon. The problem is, which yarn should I use?

I’m thinking of going with toe-up socks, knit in simple stockinette with ribbing at the top. So I don’t want to use yarn for this that would be better suited for a different, perhaps more dramatic stitch pattern (because one day, I will try my hand at one of those!).

Click on the photo to embiggen it (and my shoes in the bottom of the frame—I was standing on Sylvia’s picnic table when I took the picture) and let me know which yarn you think I should use. If you want more info on what any of the yarns are, just holler and I’ll tell you.