My toes get cold.

So I was visiting my grandmother last Summer, and one of my cousins came by the place for a visit. He was about 11 at the time and wanted me to show him how to crochet. I was glad to, so we searched the house for some cheap yarn he could use. (My grandmother knits, but we didn't want to use her nice yarn just to teach crochet.)

We finally found some Red Heart Super Saver in the bottom of one of her closets and set to it.

Unfortunately neither of us counted on two simple things:

• I have many fantastic teaching abilities, but I suck at teaching crochet.

• He is 11 and has a very short attention span.

So he was holding the yarn and the hook wrong, but I was powerless to show him how to hold them correctly or to explain how he was holding them wrong. (In fairness to him, there are numerous accepted ways to hold both the yarn and the hook, but he was still holding both wrong.) He managed to chain a bit and then get a few stitches done, but couldn't work up the ambition to keep going.

So ended the crochet lesson.

Not one to waste an opportunity, I frogged his work and used the yarn to make these:


Socks!

My grandmother's yarn is the purplish, bluish, pinkish variegated yarn. As you can see, I ran out of yarn near the end of the second sock. I wasn't too overcome with love over the color of the yarn (I did find it at the bottom of a closet, after all), and I didn't want to buy a whole new skien of it just for the last couple of inches of toe, so I used some other yarn I had lying around. You may recognize it as the yarn I used to make this blanket. I don't remember which project came first.

I kind of like the one red toe. For one thing, I always know which sock to put on my left foot. For another, when I wear these socks it kind of looks like I've recently suffered some horrible foot injury, which is kind of cool.

I know the socks look awful lying on the floor like that. They're not so bad on:


They're more slipper socks than anything else. The yarn I used is too bulky for the socks to fit inside most shoes. The knobbly stitch is kind of uncomfortable to walk on for too long at a time anyway. But for just hanging around the house on a day off from work? These socks rule.

I definitely have more socks on my list of future projects. I'd have to use a finer yarn, though.

Some day I may show you a pair that I started and then aborted, but there's not really enough of that to fill out an entire post. Maybe I'm due for another post of failed projects.