Author: To the Nth

Sock the First!

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I finished my very first sock last night, and it turned out sock-shaped and everything.

Sock the First

Two nights ago, I stayed up until midnight knitting because I got it into my head that I couldn’t possibly go to sleep until I finished the gusset decreases. Despite the late hour I retired, I awoke bright and early yesterday morning determined that I would have a completed sock off the needles and on my foot before going to bed that night.

And I did it!

New skills learned in the course of Sock the First:

  • Working with small-sized, stabbity DPNs (double-pointed needles)
  • Turning a heel
  • Picking up stitches
  • Kitchener stitch (for grafting the toe)

I had better cast on for Sock the Second real soon, lest I get distracted by some shiny new knitting project and wind up having a lonely sock forever pining for its mate (a feeling to which I can relate at the moment, alas).

Besides, my other foot is cold.

New Year, New… Socks?

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Once upon a time, I was not a knitter. (Bet you didn’t know  “once upon a time” meant “last summer,” did you?) With the help of a scrying pool that suspiciously resembled my MacBook, I studied the lore of needles, knits, and purls. With much trial and error was this arcane knowledge won, and with each error I expanded my vocabulary of, ah… magic words of the sort with which Sailors (and *cough* some of their wives, apparently) pepper their speech and mothers attempt to keep from the tongues of their babes.

I have knit long scarves, lace dishcloths, and cabled hats. I have knit woolly fingerless mitts and Navy uniform-spec watch caps. I have knit for myself and for gifts and for no real reason at all. While by no means a master of the craft, I believe I am vanishingly close to being able to claim the title of sorceress Knitter, with a capital ‘K.’

Only one thing stands in my way of my own self-perception of knitting accomplishment: a pair of socks.

For reasons obscure even in my own mind, I will not feel I have truly arrived in the knitting world until I complete my first pair of socks. For me, hand-knit socks carry a cachet that outstrips the apparent humbleness of a couple of modified tubes into which one jams one’s chilly feet. You knit and purl and knit and purl forever. Then, screwing up your courage, you perform the mysterious rite known as “turning the heel,” which to me really does appear to be a magic spell one casts with wands shaped like double-pointed needles. Then you knit some more, conjuring up something called a “gusset,” and before you know it, there sits before you a sock where once was only a ball of yarn.

I’m still in the “knit and purl forever” phase of my first sock.

Sock cuff, with many stabbity needles.

Two-by-two ribbing, on and on and on.

I am a little concerned that I might just keep knitting the cuff forever, for fear that I will thoroughly embarrass myself with a pitiful first attempt at turning the heel. Things might progress a wee bit faster, however, if I had a mite less “help” from the feline contingent.

Cat noms yarn. Yum.

Vera's possession of four paws does little to help her manipulate four DPNs, so she prefers to snack on the raw material instead.

Actually, I feel fairly well prepared (thanks to Silver’s Sock Class) to turn the heel and make a go at finishing Sock the First. It’s Sock the Second that worries me. After the sense of accomplishment that comes from learning the skills necessary to complete the first, will the lack of novelty make the second an exercise in drudgery? Will I be whining, “But I just did this. I don’t want to do it again yet!”

Come to think of it, I have the same questions about deployment. We are in the early days of our first one, and I can’t help but wonder if the fact that I don’t really know what to expect is a blessing. I have yet to experience the kinds of things that can go wrong, so I can focus on the novel aspects of this type of separation. I wonder if it hasn’t quite sunk in yet that I really and truly will not have my husband home with me for several months. I fear that after we get through all the new challenges this deployment will present, after the joyful rush of homecoming and after the comfortable routine of having our family on one continent again, that the inevitable preparations for his second deployment will be all the more difficult. I’ll know what I’m in for, and it won’t even be shiny and new.

All those are worries based on borrowed trouble, of course, and are probably best saved for later. Meanwhile, I need to get a move on if I want to have a completed pair of handmade socks to show off before we get too far into this deployment.

Warning: Contains Frivolity

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Please note that the following post could be termed girly, frivolous, and quite possibly shallow.  If discussion of appearance is not your cup of tea, you might want to skip this one.  😉

All right, if you are still reading, I have a question for you: have you ever made a dramatic change to your appearance while your significant other was deployed?

The “dramatic change” percolating in the back of my mind is a haircut.  Once upon a time, back when my husband and I started dating (*cough-I was sixteen-cough*) I had long hair.  It got progressively shorter over the course of my college career, a little bit longer again before our wedding, and then I chopped it all off into a super-short pixie upon discovering that our brand-new duty station was wont to hit 90° in February.  In the two and a half years since moving back to a part of the country that has sensible seasons, I have let my hair get long again.

It’s not a cute, flowing-tresses kind of long.  It’s a too-lazy-to-get-a-haircut long, with an a dash of haven’t-found-a-stylist-I-like thrown in for flavor.  At least my hair is curly enough to somewhat disguise the fact that I don’t actually have a hairstyle per se, but it is definitely time to cart my mane to a salon.  I can tell, because all I ever do with it is put it up in a frowzy ponytail, a look that does nothing to dissuade people from the mistaken impression that I might be a teenager.

My husband, bless his heart, has never made any controlling noises over my hair.  When I chopped it all off just a few months after our wedding, he took it in stride and still told me I looked cute.  I am not unaware, however, that he prefers my hair longer.  Although he has made it clear that he knows my hair is my own to do with as I please, the fact that I know he likes longer hair has played a part in the past couple years’ grow-it-out venture.  The status quo has been easy to maintain.

Now my husband is getting ready to deploy.  There is a big part of me that wants to mark his departure with a major haircut, perhaps even going as short as the pixie cut I loved so much when we were in Texas.  I mentioned this to my husband, and it turns out that not only is he unsurprised, but he rather assumed that was the plan.  Guess I’ve been a little more transparent about my state of “enh” with longer hair than I thought.  He’s completely at peace with the thing I’ve wanted to do all along!  Woohoo, right?

Well… until my silly brain stepped in to complicate matters, at least.  As we approach his departure date, I find myself running up against a mental snag.  I had initially thought that going in for the Big Haircut was something I would do by myself after he left, symbolic of a fresh start for the upcoming months of living on my own, yadda yadda yadda.  Then I started thinking about our actual goodbye before he flies out to the ship, the last memories we would form of each other before saying, “See you in X months.”

I might actually have a problem with immediately changing my appearance from what my husband would have in mind as his last pre-deployment, in-person mental picture of me.  My, my.  How… sentimental? …of me.

I know everyone changes over the course of a deployment — life goes on, we can’t sit there and stagnate, etc.  I’m just not sure I have it in me to email my husband a picture of my new ‘do along with a message that effectively says (no matter what I might actually type), “Hey honey, you left and now I look completely different from how you remember me!  Hope you recognize your own wife next time we see each other, ha ha!”

There would seem to be a simple solution to a problem that likely exists only in my mind.  My tentative new plan is to get my hair cut before my husband heads out, while he still has a chance to get used to the look beforehand.

Whew.  If you’ve made it this far, thank you, patient Reader, for sifting through the above mountain-out-of-molehill mawkishness.  Ultimately, I do know that it’s just hair, and the wonderful thing about hair is that it (mostly) grows back.  Even if I have a hair “disaster”, it’s not important.

I am still curious as to whether my fellow military spouses have made or thought about making a big outward change during a deployment or other separation.  How did it work out for you?  Would you do it again?  Better yet, do you have any big plans for the next time military exigencies have you spending a big chunk of time away from your love?