Blackberry Bramble Socks

Needles: 2.25 mm dpn
Yarn: Araucania Ranco Colorway 75% wool and 25% polyamide 100grs
Pattern: Blackberry Bramble by Irish Girlie Knits; available through Ravelry

Blackberries are prolific plants in Oregon. Many consider them a weed and resort to burning the bushes to get rid of them, although that doesn't always work. They can grow high, serving as fences, and remind me of the brambles that surrounded castles in fairy tales such as Sleeping Beauty. The fruit, however, is delicious when ripe and sweet and I especially like them in pies. Always, we have blackberry pie in late August, when they are at their peak. It's lovely, too, to have blackberry pie in bleak mid-winter, to remind us that summer will indeed come again.

Psychotic Pumpkin Socks

Needles: 2.25 mm dpn
Yarn: 100% Superwash Merino 2-ply 110grams/3.9ounce and 440 yards
Colorway: psychotic pumpkin from SeeJaneKnit Yarns on Etsy which she describes as

In-your-face with a manic orange glow, but its guts are mellow-yellow/squash-yellow. Socks knitted with this yarn just might help you survive another Thanksgiving dinner with the family.

Yes, indeed!

Cranberry Twist Socks

Cranberry Twist
Needles: 2.25 mm dpn
Yarn: 420 yard skein of Cherry Tree Hill Supersock Select, a pure superwash merino fingering weight yarn from Alaskan Nancy on Etsy
Pattern: Mock baby cable

You Are My Sunshine (Baby Socks)

Needles: 3.25 mm dpn
Yarn: Summer Sun by March Hare 75/25 Superwash merino/nylon; 455 yards per ball; fingering weight
Pattern: Two x two ribbing

A Good Day to Wear Wool Socks

I recently came across this essay, A Brief History of Socks and Hand-knitted Footwear, which I found fascinating to read. There was recent post on the knitlist as well, signed "Maggie in IL" who reminded us that many years ago almost all hand knit socks were made of wool and people knew to wear them with shoes and to darn holes and thin spots. She reminds us that yes, 100% wool socks do need to be hand washed and that the tighter the knit the better the wearing.

It's a cold, dark, wet, and dreary Oregon autumn day and I'm working late today and so this morning I put on a pair of handknit socks ; specifically the Go Beavs! socks I finished recently, with an orange pullover and a black skirt. My feet are very, very happy that I did.

Autumn Sunset Socks

Needles: 2.25 mm dpn
Yarn: Castle Fibers 90% wool, 10% nylon sock yarn
Pattern: Stockinette

Goldengrove Unleaving Socks

I named these socks after a phrase in a poem I like entitled Spring and Fall: To a Young Child by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie.
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Needles: 2.25 mm dpn
Yarn: Uber-gold sock yarn (100g of 75% superwash merino wool and 25% nylon) from
Black Trillium on Etsy; bought in May, 2008
Pattern: Cascading Leaves, a free pattern on Ravelry.
Modifications: I knitted extra repeats for the legs and included the pattern down into the feet.

Deep Blue Sea Baby Socks

I knit these during my breaks and during lunch time at work earlier this week.

Needles: 2.25 mm dpn
Yarn: Fingering weight 75/25 Superwash merino/nylon 455 yards per ball from The March Hare on Etsy
Pattern:
Rnd 1: Sl1, k2, psso, p1
Rnd 2: K1, yo, k1, p1
Rnds 3 and 4: K3, p1