Well, I've figured it out.

I've had a few false starts with socks over the past year or so. I had a hard time getting past the first few inches of the cuff, when all you have on your needles is a squiggly few rows of ribbing and it seems impossible that such a mess will ever be a functional sock. But now I know...

© Bonnie Kate Wolf

... socks aren't hard. Like, at all.

I first suspected that this was the case when I read Elizabeth Zimmerman's section on socks in Knitting Without Tears. Before I knew what was happening, I was reading her go-to sock recipe, realizing that hey, I know how to do all of these things. Knitting in the round on DPNs? Did that on a sweater a few months ago. Picking up stitches? Yep. Decreasing? Duh. 

© Bonnie Kate Wolf

I wound two skeins of overdyed worsted-weight Patons Classic Wool Merino that I had in my stash, and forged ahead.

These weren't a particularly fast knit. Figuring out how to make the three back cables merge together for the ankle decreases was a challenge, and I had to reverse-engineer it for the second sock because I hadn't taken very good notes the first time. But apart from Elizabeth Zimmerman's basic guidelines for the heel and toe and her helpful suggestion that I decrease for the ankle, there was no pattern to follow. Just me and the knitting.

How satisfying.

© Bonnie Kate Wolf

These socks took me through a week and a half of cat-sitting, the birth of my nephew, the Kate Wolf Music Festival, most of the Summer Olympics, and weeks of job searching. The first sock, knit during the first three joyous and relaxing events, actually came out at a much looser gauge than the second sock, which I mostly knit during breaks from writing cover letters. They're a good couple of inches different in size, but fortunately they both fit on my feet!