Socks - Christmas in July

Back in May, I realized that my super easy portable socks were not, in fact, super easy - and I needed a super easy project to take along on an outing. I grabbed these two balls of yarn that I got in Austin last December and cast on for Christmas socks:

They are my basic vanilla socks with a contrast color for cuff, heel, and toe. They are not quite identical, but they are pretty darn close. If you look at the green stripes near the beginning and end, you can spot the difference. It is too hot to wear wool socks here right now, but these will be very festive in December!

Working with two balls of yarn definitely makes a vanilla sock less mindless and portable (these 100-gram balls take up room in my bag!), but this was still an easy carry-around project.

I was on vacation last week and took three projects with me. The first one is still super secret so I'll tell you about it later. The second one was my crochet shawl and that deserves its own post. The third project - the backup project - was these blue socks:

This is the second pair of socks I've started from this yarn. The first pair was so boring I couldn't bring myself to work on them. This one has a beautiful motif on the front of the leg, but it is very slow to work. The right twists are easy and fun to work, but the left twists are torture and they really slow me down.

I realized that I could not work on these in the car, because the slightest bump on the road threw off my twisted stitches - and this is not an easy project to rip back (I've done it once and hope not to do it again). As much as I like this diamond pattern, I might rip these back yet AGAIN and do something else. Perhaps I'll make another pair of these diagonal rib socks that I did in 2010 - they use the right twist stitch only. I actually still wear these socks a LOT in the wintertime!

As it happens, I popped into a little yarn and fabric shop in Stowe, Vermont, and snagged two balls of this sock yarn that were in the half price bin (who can resist an entire pair of socks for $7.49? not me!):

So I took my blue socks off the needles and held them on waste yarn so I could cast on a truly simple pair of socks out of this autumnal orange. I chose a garter rib pattern, which is an old favorite:

My only concern is that this yarn is a bit on the thick side. It is labelled as fingering, but working it on my usual 2.0 mm needles is a little difficult, and the fabric is pretty stiff. So I might rip this out and start over on 2.25 mm needles (which would probably also require a stitch count adjustment).

I ended up doing a LOT of ripping out on my various projects over the last couple of weeks, so my forward progress is not as much as I normally boast after a vacation. But that's fine.