These were a real journey. While visiting mom at her cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains, in Pigeon Forge, TN, back at the end of 2018, I also stopped by the beautiful Smoky Mountain Spinnery, to ogle the fiber, and return with an armload. There I found a pile of Knitted Wit Sock yarn on the front table, all in colorways named for national parks. I found a Great Smoky Mountains colorway, and had to have it. This was a Great Smoky Mountains inspired yarn, for sale at the Smoky Mountain Spinnery, in the Great Smoky Mountains! I brought the skein back to Los Angeles with me, intending to make mom some Smoky Mountain socks to wear at her cabin. I decided to make this my first ever two-at-a-time magic loop socks, which meant these took longer than my other 3 or 4 pairs of socks combined!

Magic loop is just slower than DPNs, period. It has to be. I can switch from one DPN to the next in something like 3 seconds, and never fuss with a cord at any point. That’s just not a possibility with magic loop, wherein you have to fight the one needle back in, turn the work, and pull the other needle out. At my fastest, that’s still about 30 seconds to a minute of fussing with the cable, especially as a tight knitter. That, and my constant need to adjust the twist in the cable, and fight the yarn and cable apart when they’d get tangled, and the fact that it feels like you’re making half the progress when doing two-at-a-time (not true, but it feels it), and the switching back and forth between yarns, meant that I kept getting really tired of knitting on them. Instead of my sock in under 2 days, and 2 socks in 3-4 days, when cruising along, these took me almost 2 months. I just kept doing a few rounds, and putting them aside for days, exhausted.

So, I meant to finish them and have them to her by Mother’s Day. That date slipped by, and I changed it to her birthday, mid June. That, too, slipped past. Then I planned to finish them and bring them to Montana, where we would both be flying in from our respective homes for a relative’s wedding at the end of June. I just finished them the day before the trip, and left them hanging out to dry on sock blockers in my shower, intending to wrap and gift them when she flew back with me for a brief visit at my house. However, her plane had so many delays and mechanical problems, and there were so many other scheduling issues, that she spent the whole day at the airport, only to have her whole trip canceled out from under her. She never even got to leave home. So, after returning from MT by myself, the dried pair remained on my desk for another 5+ months, when, thankfully, I remembered to bring them with me to gift on Christmas morning. And thankfully, they fit perfectly, and she thought they were very comfortable! Phew!