Why knitting socks is like golf

I don't golf but my husband does and occasionally we go to the driving range and he makes an attempt to teach me (if you haven't had this experience substitute a husband teaching you how to drive a stick shift or something similar).

At some point in these lessons I have to make it very clear that this head can only follow one piece of advice at a time so there is no point telling me to bend my knee, straighten my arm, sit back, stay loose, hold my right hand this way and my left hand that way, to look here not there. We agree that if I am not going to do any stomping off to the car that Barbara is only required to do one of these things a turn and when this becomes absolutely automatic (see previous post on muscle memory) will she then move onto the next piece of good advice.

Teaching myself to knit socks appears to involve the same process.

OK I have found out that if you knit on needles that are too large you get loose socks. Have learned about gauge.

Next pair, bamboo needles break ( but they are so nice and the steel ones have given me sores in fingers - so get more bamboos and don't sit on them). But learned how to graft a toe.

Next pair, learn now pick up extra stitches to avoid holes at the sides of the heel from Youtube video. Good no holes, a very good thing.

Nice wool counts. I am crazy about this Opal yarn which is so soft in the hands and knitting this first sock for a large footed son has made me happy just to look at the colours. Also very happy with the k3 p1 sock top so that is another thing I have learned.

Still to figure out:

A decent cast one that won't be too tight. For this pair I used a cable cast on with one purl and three knit ( I saw this on another Youtube video) which is pretty flexible but not enough and still a bit messy looking.

Everything I read tells me to do the Long Tail cast-on and my reliable sock book tells me to do something called the Old Norwegian cast on which looks completely nuts like cat's cradle and both methods are supposed to involve using one end of the yarn from the top and one from the rear end of the yarn, if you can find it (and I couldn't and practically unravelled a whole ball trying to find it with my DH finally telling me "I don't know what you are trying to do but I can tell you that doesn't look like it is going anywhere good" and he was right I had twisted yarn all over my seat belt and NO OTHER END of the yarn at all) and also involves working out a length of tail that is exactly the right length and no longer (or apparently you will run out early) and that involves calculations of how many twists around the needle per stitch, and all of this just seems to me to be way too much work and completely nerve-wracking.

But still something else I have to learn.

So I am doing sock two the same way and doing some sewing while I think this through.

On muscle memory and dealing with my ambitions

I was reading some random article that was really about something else this week about muscle memory. The quick and too-simple explanation of this from what I understood, was that once you do something enough your brain builds little default messages to your muscles so you can do things without having to think about them when you do them. This is why our mouths know how to move to say words without having to think about it every time we speak (and this explains why when you try to pronounce a word in a foreign language it feels like you can't force your own mouth to do it even thought a two year old in that country can do it so well. It also explains why we have accents in other languages - our old English speaking muscle memories get in the way and don't give up). Which explains why sometimes it may seem as if it is too hard to learn new things, too much training gets in the way and all that new muscle teaching hurts. That's the down side and why older people can both be so set in their ways and also, as the flip side, can have a facility with something they have done all their lives that it just takes your breath away. Think of a group of over 75 church ladies working the kitchen, or watching a grandmother crochet. Or me threading a sewing machine.

Now the part that really interests me about this though was the possibility that it is possible at any stage to build new little neuron pathways in your brain to build new muscle memory. Improvements are good and the new piece for me was that if I struggle to learn something new, it's just because I have so many super duper muscle memories already built in that the new stuff is going to take time to push that all over and fit in some new pathways.

Don't you love what I can do with science?

All of this made me decide to stick with new skill learning and not to get frustrated if it was a lot of work.

Which brings me of course to my sock knitting. I have just decided I am going to learn to knit socks. As has been previously identified I am very interested in doing things for my family and the way I see it everyone has feet and socks aren't a sometimes thing, they are an everyday thing, and a person who would be knitting good socks would be doing something useful. (If anyone else out there grew up on the Canadian prairies you will understand without my explaining why usefulness is in there deeper than even muscle memory - it's almost prenatal where I come from).

The only problem with this of course is that I don't knit, not really.

So here illustrated are my first almost finished DH socks. Parts of these socks have been ripped out and reknitted so often that the stitches in place are almost fluffy with fraying, the cuff of one is also sort of coffee coloured because I was so involved in trying to reknit the heel on one (I can't remember if DH has pointy heels, I hope so) that I threw the other one onto the bedside table where it landed, cuff first, in a cold cup of coffee.

The only thing that is keeping me going (apart from the fact that the process is kind of interesting) is my memory, mental not muscle, of how it was when I learned to sew about 45 years ago. I remember an awful lot of failures and weird outfits (I could write a how-not-to dress book) for decades really but somehow I kept at it (I think because I really love fabric) and eventually things started to turn out. Often.

My assumption is that my next pair of socks will be better. Or maybe that will be a the pair after this one. I only seem to be able to absorb one improvement at a time.

What I have learned this far is that having the right number of stitches on the needles and keeping the exact specific number of stitches on the needles that they tell you too really matters.

A lot.

Unlike sewing where you can always make up fixes or at least hope it will look better when it's ironed, knitting is pretty precise.

Now I wonder if my brain can grow those channels.