Just before leaving Connecticut after Christmas, I finished two pairs of socks that had been lingering on the needles.

The final pair of the year was my own, begun last March as part of Sock Madness and was ultimately my dismissal from the competition:

These are Simple Side to Side Socks by Deborah Swift knit in Koigu Painter’s Palette Premium Merino (colorway cleverly titled P141), which I won several years ago in a blog contest. They had a unique construction, wherein the body was knit flat and seamed, then ribbing, toe, and heel were added afterwards. At the time, I did not enjoy knitting them, although that probably had more to do with a lack of sleep and trying to finish them as a deadline ran out than with the pattern itself. I panicked about being able to feel the seams on the first sock as the clock ran out on me and threw the second sock into a bag for nine months until a knitting buddy and I were commiserating about how much grafting had been necessary to construct these. So I pulled them out of isolation and began working on them in my spare time. Ultimately, you don’t notice those seams at all and they’re quite comfortable to wear.

The penultimate pair of the year was Mum’s Christmas present this year. I started them back in September, put them aside to work on a couple other things in October, and pulled them back out in November. I was able to present Mum with only a single completed sock under the tree on Christmas, but powered through to finish the second sock the next night, making them practically done on time.

The pattern is Belvedere by Kirsten Kapur and the yarn is Yarn Hollow Summer Love, an elasticky bamboo-cotton-nylon blend (colorway 113), which I bought at Sock Summit. The knitting buddy mentioned above and I had our own little knitalong online for these and together managed to create some lovely socks, if I do say so myself. The key to our success turned out to be lots of stitch markers placed throughout the pattern to help keep track of where you were.

It was nice to finish my knitting year with two such different sock projects.

And it was fun to model them before parting ways with Mum.