Olympic knitting
I didn’t join any of the various knitting things that run alongside the Olympics. This is because I am not in general a joiner of things, I know my limitations and I know that I’m not good with deadlines or authority. It doesn’t even matter if I’m the authority that made the deadline, if I have to knit X then I’ll be wanting to knit Y. It’s far simpler for me to just watch the Olympics and do some knitting.
Having knitted my way through the Christmas stocking I found myself with an empty knitting bag. This is of course a total fabrication, I had knitting but not the sort that I wanted to knit. I didn’t have second sock syndrome with these so much as first sock syndrome, I’d had enough by the first heel. These have got to be the front runners in any “most boring sock I’ve ever knitted” competition. I couldn’t see the point in adding any patterning because the yarn is so dark that it would be a waste of effort so it was all plain knitting with boring dark splitty yarn. The only way these were ever going to be finished (they’ve been in progress since September) was to ignore the call of the cast on and get on with it. I did seriously consider ripping them just after the second heel (yes, they were that tedious) but I stuck it out. The obvious question is why did I buy such boring yarn in such a hard to knit colour? I bought it with a red semi striping Trekking yarn with the plan to knit stranded socks except that this yarn is boring, dark, splitty and elasticated and I couldn’t manage to get anything like an even tension. The sorry tale is here, it’s taken me three years to knit up the frogged yarn.
Having seen off the boringest knitting in the history of knitting I could cast on with a clear conscience. These are some of the leftovers from my Ophelia sweater, when I dyed the yarn one skein came out lighter than the others and that’s the one that I’m using here. It just happened that when I took a photo of the sock against the tv that the four man bob chose that moment to invert. Sorry America 3, it was all my fault.
There is the potential for more Olympic knitting even though the closing ceremonies are over. I can pause live tv and rewind it which is good for getting replays of things that went past too quickly the first time. I’ve been using it for stalking hats in the crowd and I think this is the one on the top of my list. The second placed hat exists only in my memory because I didn’t think of catching it with the camera so it’s fair to assume that it is now lost for all time. I like this one, a dubbelmossa, plain except for the detail on the roll over cuff (a good warm four layers there over the ears), knit long with a tassel on top. The other hat had a heavily patterned band in different colours to the rest of the plain hat. The common feature is a patterned band on an otherwise plain hat so that’s what I’ll be going with.
