I've taken to knitting fairly frequently again. It's largely that I've finally gotten to sock knitting, which has a lot of advantages over knitting larger stuff. In no particular order:
- Socks are fairly small, so they go fairly quickly. I can knit a pair of socks in about a week or so.
- Wool socks are very practical (they're warm, comfortable, breathe very well, and stay warm when wet), and its hard to get nice wool socks that fit well and aren't stratchy. Not impossible, but not easy, and sufficiently not cheap that it's not impractical to knit them yourself.
- Socks don't take much wool, so they're not that expensive to buy the wool for.
- Hand-knit wool socks make great presents. Moreover, since people can always use lots of socks, you can give them lots and it's not bad.
- I really like hand-knit wool socks, since they're really shaped to your foot very exactly.
- Socks are a convenient project to bring with you anywhere, such as in movie theatres, when watching TV with one's wife, etc.
Now, there are many ways to make socks — at a guess there are four or five ways to make the toe and maybe twice that many to make the heel. I don't know them all, but socks may well be the original argment (knitting stretches much better than weaving does, and socks have the dual requirement of being flexible and skin-tight). Knitting is essentially the same as it was for the last several hundred years. Circular needles are better than they used to be in the 50s, but sock knitting is done on double-pointed kneedles, which haven't changed at all, so far as I know. Double-pointed needles are just straight sticks which are sharpened on both ends — making them requires a few straight sticks and a knife. They're simpler even than your typical 2 straight needles (which need end-caps, and thus more tools than just a knife). And knitters are a clever bunch — knitting really encourages experimentation both because it's relatively easy to undo failed experiments and by a theme that sort of runs throughout the practice of rubbing two sticks together to make a sweater.
There's one school of thought which runs that one should try making a lot of different methods of making socks to find the method which one really likes best. I don't belong to that school. I make a short-row heel (also known as an hour-glass heel), and use kichener stich to sew up the toe. It's my plan to stick with that for quite a while. This is where the Kung Fu comes in.
There's a fairly old kung fu saying that, "it's better to be the master of one punch than to be good at ten". My plan is to get very good at making the socks using the methods I know. One gets a lot faster, and the better I get the more socks I'll get. Moreover, the faster and better I can make the socks that I can make, the more fun making socks will be, and the less the natural disinclination to work will make me keep from starting a project. For every worthwhile thing in this world, there are always a million reasons not to start doing it. This is especially true once you're married with a full time job, your own business on the side, and never get enough sleep. Human weakness being what it is, the easier one can make the worthwhile things, the more likely you are to actually do a few of them.
(What made me think of all this is the title of the blog of one of the knitters I met at the local Stitch-and-bitch knitting circle.)