Yesterday was "Mismatch Day" at the kid's school. I, myself, would have interpreted this as a day to wear garish colors or polka dots with plaids and stripes, rather than the ugly tie as bandana with broken sunglasses look he opted for, but that's okay. He's happy with it, and these days, that means a lot.
I've been having fun knitting these striped Halloween socks. They're self-striping yarn hand-dyed Lovesticks sock yarn. I had to custom order these two colorways. The completed pair, are called "Toil and Trouble" and the almost completed black/white/orange pair are called "Trick or Treat". These were very fast knits. I got two pairs almost done in just one week. In fact, I should have been done with the second pair, but I started getting distracted by other projects. As tomorrow is Halloween, I need to finish that sock up. These are fun, silly socks and they're totally cute. (Ooh, I totally sound like a teenage girl. Totally.) There's something mindnumbingly soothing about knitting a simple striped stockinette sock where you don't have to think further than "ooh, look, it's another orange stripe". I usually do a heel flap with a gusset, but with a wide self-strip, I like a short row heel. I tried two different spots for the heel in the stripe pattern. With the green/orange/purple colorway, I started the heel after the thin green stripe. With the black/orange one, I started after the thick orange stripe, which does give me a neat bullseye sort of heel, but then I get that thick double orange stripe on the front of the sock. I can't decide which way I like better. Anyway, tomorrow we're going to carve that bad boy pumpkin up. The kid has greater faith in my artistic abilities than I deserve, as he was talking about intricate designs that I'm thinking are just not going to happen, but we'll see. I remember my brother being really good at pumpkin carving. (Yo, Greg, isn't that right?) Me, I'm just going for the basic scary jack o' lantern design. But I'll be wearing spooky striped socks.