Sock Saga

Warning:  This post is about knitting.  If you are only interested in quilting, piecing and applique, you are excused from reading further.  Unless of course you are curious about the relationship between THIS quilt block  and my current knitting conundrum.

This all started because Anna gave me some fantastic yarn for Christmas.  I was stumped about what I could crochet with 50g besides a scarf.  So I stopped by a local yarn shop on the way home from work, hoping to find some yarn guru with a brilliant plan. Sadly, she was not helpful on that quest.  But she did say some fateful words...
"You should learn to knit.  Knitting takes much less yarn than crochet."

That certainly caught my attention since my renewed interest in crochet last year resulted in THIS top that cost me a day's wages in yarn.

As I was explaining this all to my BFF Emily, it's not as though I haven't attempted to knit (having finished most of a baby bootie from my mom's secret bootie pattern, and more recently a scarf from fluffy yarn and with big needles).  But it's like my plans to learn how to play the guitar.  The effort : payoff ratio just hasn't been sufficient to really get it.
     So I've been begging E via email to teach me how to knit socks, since she's a talented knitter and just lives across town when I get stuck. She claims that she's fine until she gets to the heel, then freaks out and rips it all out.    "AH HA!" I think.  That's going to be my plan.  I'll knit and unknit the same damn sock until I figure out how it works.
I headed to Michael's Crafts after work, figuring that I can find some inexpensive yarn that I won't feel bad about when I either wear it out from un-knitting, or get annoyed and throw it all away.  Quilters in fabric shops are not shy about asking other quilter's opinions about fabric selection and I decided to go out on a limb and ask the other lady in the yarn section if she was a knitter.  When I told her I was a very beginner knitter on a quest to learn to knit socks, she looked at me as though I had 7 eyes and a space alien bursting from my sternum.  Amidst the discouragement, I did glean that I should buy wood needles in a size 6 and not mess with the loop needle thingies.  (This is also how I refer to stuff related to computers to the computer geeks. "Do you mean the thingy that does X when I Y?")

But on the drive from there to the library I started getting seriously annoyed.  And this, my friends, takes me full circle to the opening photo.  It is the very first thing that I ever hand pieced and quilted.  You may note that it was not a 4 patch.  Or any other basic pattern.  The quilting is 14 stitches to the inch.  If you only count the front side (wouldn't that be 28 stitches to the inch to some?).  I had only embroidered/ cross stiched and used the same techique to quilt - the back is a terrible mess but the front looks really impressive.

And that was what I was thinking on my drive home.  "Lady...you have no idea." Why was I headed to the library?  To check out knitting books of course.  I need to wait until next week when my Michael's 50% off coupon applies to go buy needles.  Meanwhile, I'll be surfing the net for ideas.  But for the record, my quilt mentor Anna (who coached me through that first quilt block) agreed that I'll do fine with socks as a beginner project.