Do you know what this is?

Yeah, that’s a sock. That I knit. In two weeks.

Let’s back up a hair. This is the first sock I’ve knit in almost a  year.

I got a little slap-happy with the sock knitting last year, around MD Sheep & Wool time (which, sadly, did not happen this year due to various different things). I knit a pair of Monkey Socks in a little under three days, which, while an amazing feat of persistence, is not something I’d recommend doing. The result of that crazy knitting adventure was a serious case of nerve something or tendon somethingorother in my left arm. It basically meant that knitting more than two rows of anything made my little and ring fingers all tingly, and gave me some interesting new pains in my wrist.

I’m an artist. It’s what I do for a living. So, like any paranoid person whose livelihood depends on the use of her dominant hand, I gave the knitting a rest for a while (actually, I was not smart, because I tried knitting off and on, which accounts for the year it took to recover).

A couple of weeks ago was Stitches South, a regional knitter’s convention and fiber bazaar. The CG persuaded me that the most interesting thing I could do on a Saturday was hang out with her and buy yarn (and darned if she wasn’t right), and I took my sad, neglected little Wollmeise Sock along with me, thinking that maybe I’d get a little knitting done. Maybe.

I bought some yarn, despite my logical brain going, “you have lots of yarn you don’t use, so what’s with the new stash?” (My husband and my logical brain share many of the same opinions, by the way.) Here is what came of that trip:

(Oh, Dragonfly Yarns. You are such an irresistible temptation.)

Plus some more stuff in even more screamingly bright colors, plus a new basket to put it all in, which, ironically, was the only thing I had planned on buying. We see how well that worked out.

I had started the Wollmeise sock (knit with Creatively Dyed Yarns‘ Calypso sock, ironically enough) shortly after the Monkey socks, as I had purchased the new yarn and couldn’t wait to make something with it. It was beautiful. The sock pattern was fun and fast. And my wrists really hurt.

So I stuffed the sock into a project bag and toted it around with me for months, expecting to work on it and not being able to do anything at all. In the meantime, I spun some wool, I bound a book, I sewed three full sets of garb, I learned how to dye fabrics using roots and bark and flowers.

Somewhere along the line, all of the needles came out of the knitting and the sock unraveled a little. I misplaced the needles I had originally been using, and bought some new ones. I attempted (halfheartedly) to reposition the work onto the new needles.

Then, right before Stitches, I went to a knitting group that Jennie had been telling me about (she was there, too), and over the course of a couple of hours, not only fixed the work, but also knit several inches. By the time the evening of Stitches had passed, I had another few inches. And then last weekend, I kitchenered the toe of the first sock.

I now have two inches of work on the second done. I can do this. (And my wrist doesn’t hurt yet! Bonus!)

This doesn’t necessarily mean more complicated projects. But it does mean that I’m back knitting again, and that’s a great feeling.