Sock Karma

I probably should not have congratulated myself on how well those socks fit Jennifer yesterday. Why? After four hours of intensive knitting last night, I accomplished THIS:

Not only is it very blurry, but it is not very much knitting. I started this sock toe over - and I am not lying, exaggerating or pathologically embellishing - SEVENTEEN times. Why, you ask? Corners.

Okay, see how, with this toe-up sock, there are little corners sticking up where it was first cast on?
With the yarn I used for these socks, the yarn is kind of thin and light and pliable, so those little corners are only visually annoying and hopefully do not cause discomfort to Jennifer's little toes. However, the sock yarn I'm using now is thicker and those corners - which were HUGE in my first few casting on attempts - would feel like hard knots under the toes. Just thinking about those corners poking around in my shoes gives me the shudders. Oh, and also, the WHOLE FREAKING POINT of hand knit socks is that they are super comfy in the toes because they don't have seams, as opposed to manufactured socks.

I thought that maybe the corners were showing up because I was an inexperienced toe-up knitter, so I just tried redoing it until the corners went away. No dice. Then I remembered there is this thing called the Internet, so I used it to look up other people's toe-up socks. Unless the yarn was super fuzzy and forgiving, those socks had corners, too. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any solutions or even other people freaking out about sock corners on the internet, so I tried idea after idea after idea to make the corners go away, hence the seventeen tries.

Trying seventeen times didn't bother me, really. What DOES make me a little twitchy is that it took me four hours and seventeen grueling trial-and-error attempts to arrive at this solution: Pick up a couple of stitches on the edges of the cast on.

Well, duh.

I'd like to make a special apology to my mom, who called me when I was on about the 14th try. Mom, those were very naughty, impolite words and I should not have said them. You are NOT allowed to repeat them, especially in public or at the restaurant we are going to tonight.