Knit-Along: Sock Wizard Socks from The Modern Ewe - Day 3

Toes and ears...

As is always with socks, these are highly portable and easy to pick up whenever I get a spare minute. Tiny stitches aren’t easy for impatient folk like me, but I am glad for them because they play up the smooth and gradual color change that is the highlight of this yarn. Plus, such a fine gauge always guarantees the most yarn time for your dollar. A ball of Zauberball will run you somewhere in the neighborhood of $20, and I figure I’m looking at at least twenty hours of knitting (if not more) to get these socks done. There simply isn’t a better entertainment value for your dollar! Add a good audiobook downloaded for free from you local library (or, if your is like mine, they rent digital audio players, too) and the deal gets even better.

Which leads me to the subject of audiobooks. Audiobooks and knitters go together like knits and purls. Like many knitters, I’m a huge fan of the audible.com audiobook subscription service. A monthly fee gives you one credit (and most books run one credit) per month, with an astounding array of popular fiction and non-fiction titles. I load them onto my Blackberry so, like the socks, I can make progress even in tiny snatches of free time. I’m currently halfway through the behemoth 45-hour Echo in the Bone by Diana Gabaldon, part of an outstanding series that begins with the classic Outlander). This is an instance where an sublime reader makes the most of fabulous settings and accents to make the audiobook an enhanced experience from reading the novel. In that same vein, my other favorites include Lisa See’s Snow Flower and the Secret Fan or her earlier work Peony in Love. Again, a skilled reader makes the most of exotic Chinese language to add a layer to the book I’d just never get reading on my own. Still another is anything by Alexander McCall Smith of the No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency fame (another great series), although I’m particularly fond of The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs and other books starring “the brilliant but bumbling Professor Doctor Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld.” The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs remains the one an only time an audiobook has made me laugh so hard I had to pull the car over. Good thing I wasn’t attempting Fairaisle or intarsia at the time!

In about another inch, i.e. by next installment, I’ll venture into the dangerous heel turn. Who knows what could happen then...