Do you know what time it is?
If you guessed Tour de Sock time, you’d be correct! My friend and I had so much fun with it last year we decided to do it again, because knitting(!) and socks(!), and also why not!
I made sure my sock yarn stash was completely stocked up, and have been eagerly anticipating the arrival of the first pattern. Luckily it was scheduled to drop at 6 am on a weekend day on which I had nothing whatsoever planned.
So I set my alarm to go off at 5:30 this morning, to give myself enough time to get up, get coffee, get the computer going, and do all the other regular morning chores prior to getting started. Then at 6 am on the nose, the instant the pattern appeared, I printed it, grabbed the first ball of sock yarn I saw in my stash, and then cast on and started knitting.
Aside from a couple breaks to inhale some food, I knit pretty much nonstop for roughly 10 hours straight. At just a couple minutes after 4pm, I had a brand new, completed pair of handknit socks.
The pattern is Plan A, and it has a couple interesting features. The cuff is actually twisted, in that you cast on all the stitches, knit them straight for a couple rows, then twist every few stitches, before joining.
In addition, while it uses the very familiar heel flap construction, the heel gusset decreases take place in on the bottom, not on the sides.
I came in third for this heat (out of probably around a thousand or so, assuming everyone who signed up this year actually takes part), which is actually far better than I was expecting, considering there’s a whole mess of incredible knitters in Finland who routinely sweep all the top spots for this on a yearly basis. Phew!
Since knitting for 10 solid hours is a wee bit hard on the wrists, I didn’t do much else productive the rest of the day. Luckily, however, I’d had the foresight to recognize I’d want something with which to celebrate, and made a batch of these peanut butter pots de creme the night before.
‘Pots de creme,’ by the way, is just a fancy name for a baked custard. If you sprinkle sugar on the top and hit it with a kitchen torch, it then magically transforms into creme brulee, which is what we did last night for the first two servings (the recipe makes four), but this evening I decided to stick to the script for the remaining two , and topped them with a thin layer of chocolate ganache, which turned out to be a most excellent and delicious decision.
Oh, and completely unrelated, we’ve got a new batch of kittens in our foster room. You can follow the antics of these 8 adorable purrballs here.
