So little to show

I just spent a week in London at Knit Nation, and all I have to show for it is this:

sock in progress

Oh, don’t get me wrong. Knit Nation was a blast, as you can see on the other teachers’ blogs. I just couldn’t be bothered to record it in photos. (Go ahead, call me lazy. It won’t hurt my feelings.)

Some of my favorite parts of Knit Nation:

• Being in London! The architecture, the museums, the food, the Underground, the shopping… oh, if only London weren’t so far from Oregon, I’d go once a year rather than once a decade.
• Catching other Underground riders sneaking peeks at me, while I was knitting in public. Some were clearly intrigued (why? surely others must knit on the Underground), yet no-one said a word to me.
• Having a 10th-floor classroom, with windows overlooking tony neighborhoods and the Royal Albert Hall. Even the locals peered out the windows, oohing and aahing at the views.
• Meeting a whole new slew of students, some from very different knitting traditions. It was gratifying to be able to share new cast-ons with them, and new uses for crochet hooks, even if our knitting styles were dramatically different. Most likely, I’ll never master a pencil-hold throwing style, and they’ll never adopt a continental combination style, but we were able to meet in the middle!
• Alice and Cookie’s ever gracious and unflappable staff. Any event—especially a new event—is going to have its minor hiccups, and this crew managed to overcome them cheerfully.
• Seeing all the other groups staying in the Imperial College dorms. At breakfast, they’d work their way through the cafeteria in waves: the college students from Texas; the oh so fashionably dressed Italians with matching yellow backpacks; the Japanese Girl Scouts in blue and white uniforms.
• Finally realizing, after years of teaching on the road, that if I want green tea or mint tea rather than coffee or black tea, I can travel with my own tea bags. Better yet: realizing I could buy tea in London. Why did it take me so long to figure this out?? (Okay, I must be slow on top of being lazy.)

But back to the sock-in-progress. Getting ready for the trip, I packed at least four projects, including two sock designs, some lace, and yarn for swatching for a sweater. In the end, though, the project that called to me the loudest—and that received all my attention, leaving all the other projects untouched—was a sock design for which I had written up most of the pattern over a year ago, then set aside for who knows what reason. It was relaxing to cast on and just follow the instructions since, most of the time, I’m figuring out the pattern as I’m knitting the sample.

This sample makes use of the Channel Islands cast-on:

soft picots, courtesy the Channel Island cast-on

Though I think I’ll include instructions in the pattern for working other sorts of cuffs as well, in case the knitter doesn’t care for this one.

The stitch pattern—a simple lace and rib number that promises to be super comfy—flows nicely from the cuff’s ribbing and into the heel flap:

it’s all about the flow

And I’ll probably finish off the patterning on the instep by bringing it to a point. That’s so much better than abruptly switching to stockinette just before starting the toe, don’t you think?

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