I learned to knit from the Reader’s Digest Complete Book of Knitting about 1980. I had checked out a book from my high-school library about knitting sweaters on a circular needle. On the body, I got as far as the underarm. Yay! But I couldn’t figure out how to knit the sleeves on the same circular needle.  (I didn’t know about DPNs or using two circs.) So I abandoned knitting until 1985 or so, when I made several things working flat. Some projects were successful; others, not so much.

About 1990, I started getting more serious, making a bunch, a whole bunch, of baby blankets for friends and co-workers.

Knitting has kept me from committing mass murder once or twice (and a few other solo murders). I once knit five sweaters in two months because I was so stressed out.

I’ve knit scads of baby blankets, including one I took with me to Russia to pass the hours (and hours and hours) on the plane. After twenty years of exile to a very warm un-knit-friendly place (southeast Texas), I now live in a place I love, with mountains and four actual seasons. I knit lots and lots of socks and not quite so many sweaters.

I’m a big fan of the late, great Elizabeth Zimmermann (everyone’s “ten dollar” knitting grandma) and her daughter Meg Swansen. Love their books and DVDs. My go-to sock patterns are from Cat Bordhi’s New Pathways for Sock Knitters: Book One (I prefer the toe-up patterns).

Updated October 2018: And I’ve clearly turned into a shawl person. Who knew??

My Knitting Style

I am a traditional, Western-mount knitter. That means I hold the source needle with the existing stitches in my left hand and the working needle where I form new stitches in my right hand. I wrap the yarn such that my stitches’ leading legs (the ones closest to the tip of the source needle) are in front.

I am what I call a “brute-force thrower.” I hold the yarn pinched between my thumb and index finger, and my other three fingers hold the needle tip (I use circs exclusively) against my palm. After I get the needle tip in the existing stitch (sometimes by pushing the working needle into it, sometimes by dropping the source needle onto the tip of the working needle), I let go of the needle, move my entire arm to wrap the yarn, grab the needle, and finish the stitch. If you’ve seen Susan Rainey’s videos, I knit exactly the same way.

I’m in no danger of setting speed records, but my tension is quite even with only very slight rowing out, even the last knit stitch in ribbing and cables. And yes, it is more than possible to work stranded colorwork this way and get good results (see my Brae Cardigan and Hillhead vest).

Why I Knit Socks with Three Strands Held Together

I’m a total sock heretic, as I hold (just hold, not wind!) three strands of sock yarn together. I’ve mainly used Knit Picks Stroll, and their hand-painteds can be spectacular (see Slipper Socks for their Tiger Eye colorway).

I do three strands held together for several reasons:

1. I had to use a size 0/2.0 mm to get a properly dense sock fabric (9 spi, 11 rpi) for the two pairs of single-strand socks I made for myself from Stroll, which is simply too fine for the current state of my eyesight. With three strands, I can use a size 3/3.25 mm and get 5.5 spi and 7 rpi, for just 38.5 st/sq in compared to–gulp!–99 on size 0.
2. It uses stash faster (an initial consideration, as I’d had to buy kits to get some patterns I wanted).
3. It makes the most unbelievably soft, squishy cushions under your feet.
4. It avoids all issues of pooling with variegated yarn, as I don’t bother to try to sync up the color patterning of the three strands.
5. The extra thickness is like built-in pre-darning, which is good for both DH and me as we are “hard” walkers, so they last a long time. I’m not sure DH has actually worn through any of his yet, and he wears them 365 days/year, since he works from home.

Three-stranded socks are not without issues, though.

1. The socks may not fit in dress shoes (though see Pickle Juice socks for how thin the fabric actually is). The flip side of this is that I could never wear commercial “trouser socks” with my dress shoes, as I had bought them wearing pantyhose, not commercial “trouser socks.”
2. You lose the point, to some degree, of some self-patterning sock yarn, especially the “Faux Isle” prints. This issue, however, can be mitigated with a special technique that replicates the machine knitting method called plating. I unvented this technique in my Pink and Navy Socks only to control the ratio of pink and navy, then finally did it in an applied manner for the Non-Stranded Hand-Plated Kokopelli socks.