Socked In

I have yet another new obsession.

Socks!

But first...

This is my great-great-grandfather, Elias Cabot Balcom.  I love that name.  From the little I know about him, he had a hard life.  Born in New York in 1827, by 1850 he was married and living in Iowa with a young wife and one year-old daughter.  He was listed in various documents as a wagon maker, a physician, a photographer, a postmaster, and a miller.

His oldest son, my great-grandfather Ira G. Balcom, said about him:  "Father was a very brilliant man. He knew more of chemistry, geometry and algebra than most of us do today (1935). He was a community doctor much of the time while in Ohio."

At some point he left his wife with four children, married another woman (perhaps without benefit of a divorce from my g-g-grandmother), and had two more children.  When his second wife was pregnant with their second daughter, the story goes, he took her to look at a mill he was building in West Virginia.  She fell in the mill pond, and he jumped in to rescue her.  She was fine, but he developed pneumonia and died before the child was born.  Another version of the story has him dying "cause unknown" two weeks before the child's birth. 


What does this have to do with socks?  Not much, except for this brief story in a letter written by my great-grandfather, Ira G. Balcom to his half-sister, Sarada (the unborn child) decades later:


The picture I wished you to send was one of myself, when about thirteen or fourteen years old.  I think it is likely to the one taken when your mother and I went to Syracuse to sell socks (father had bought a knitting machine). We stopped just outside the town and had some pictures taken, both of your mother and myself. [27 Jan 1933]    


This would have been in 1869 or 1870.  According to the 1870 census, the village of Syracuse in Meigs County, Ohio, had a population of about 1200 people, many of whom worked in the coal and salt works.  Ira never did say how well the socks sold.

I've been intrigued by knitting machines since I was a kid.  My mother had one of the Japanese flatbed machines.  Even the manual was in Japanese, and we never could figure out how to make it work.  It resided in our basement for about thirty years before someone decided to get rid of it.  If you're read some of my previous posts, you know that I've been really into these machines this past year.

I saw my first circular sock machine (CSM) at a Newton's Seminar a few years ago. It's been in the back of my mind ever since.   CSMs have been a niche hobby for quite some time.  The first machines for home use were sold in the 1860s.  Their heyday was apparently during WW1, when socks were needed for the armed forces.  And production of the machines pretty much ended in the 1930s.   For many years, the only way to have a CSM was to invest in a vintage or antique machine.  Since I wasn't allowed to take shop classes in high school (back in the dark ages), I'm not prepared to repair or maintain one of these machines.  In the 1980s, the Harmony Auto-Knitter was sold, but unfortunately the company went out of business.  More recently, a New Zealand company has been making the autoknitter (NZAK), which has been very popular.  They have an excellent reputation for quality and I've learned that loads of CSM knitters swear by them.

But they're awfully far away.  I worry about things like how long it will take to get replacement parts or get something repaired if (ok, when) I drop it.  If they were in the U.S., I might have invested in one of their machines by now. 

That hasn't stopped me from being fascinated by these machines.  Then a few weeks ago, convergence happened.  I had a modest windfall that I was told to spend on something "fun" for myself.  And just that morning I had seen a comment about a new CSM in one of my Ravelry groups.  AND I came across Ira's letter talking about his father's knitting machine.    One week later, I was the proud owner of "Elias Cabot" (we CSM owners like to name our machines), a brand-new Erlbacher Gearhart machine.

Meet Elias Cabot!

I don't knit socks.  Heck, I don't even wear socks.  My feet get too hot.  But I'm told that a good pair of wool socks will not cause digital overheating, so this may have to change.  Or a lot of family and friends are going to be getting socks for Christmas.  They may just get them anyway, when I get the hang of this machine.  So far I've learned to cast on using net, a webbing of waste yarn, and a cast-on sack. I can knit a tube, hang a hem, make a picot edge, and change yarns.  But I'm stumped by shaping a heel.  No matter how careful I am, I'm dropping stitches and curse words all over the place.  I know it can be done -- I've seen actual videos of actual people doing it. 

I have been knitting sock blanks for friends to dye and re-knit.  After a recent cone-winding disaster, when one of the drive chains fell off my cone winder and as I was rushing to turn it off, I knocked the skeined yarn off my swift, I had a pile of tangled undyed sock yarn, and spent a few mindless evenings untangling it.  Several times I had to cut it and start over, and the friction caused by untangling made the yarn pill and fray in spots, so it was not sock-worthy.  Wanting to try out some different ways of making self-patterning yarn, I knit them into blanks anyway, and went to town on the dyes.

Note to self:  NEVER EVER AGAIN try to dye yarn in the kitchen.  And ALWAYS put the lid back on the little container of powdered dye completely.  And NEVER pick up said little container by the lid.  Fortunately my kitchen is all tile and stainless steel, so there was no permanent damage except for one shirt that bore the brunt of the flying powder when the little jar slipped out of the lid and hit the counter.   The only other comment I will make on this unfortunate incident is thank goodness for Reduran.  A good scrubbing got everything off my skin except the spots I didn't notice.  Having turquoise cleavage is not a fashion statement I care to repeat.

Anyway, I dyed up several blanks and look forward to seeing how they knit up.  I knitted the first blank fairly wide, then painted half of it black.  On the other half, I alternated turquoise and yellow stripes.  I painted this one with dye on both sides because I didn't want any white flecks.

This should give me narrow bands of colored stripes alternating with black.  The yellowish bands on the top and bottom and in the center of the blank are waste yarn and were pulled out when I wound the cones.









Next I decided to try some different colors in bands to see how nicely they played together.  They actually stayed in their own places pretty well, but the result was boring and the red stripe was too wide.  So I got into the black dye left over from the previous blank and decided to make some polka dots.  When knitted up later, these dots won't line up this way -- they should appear as random bits of black here and there among the colored stripes. I did not paint the back of this blank, hoping to get a  heathery effect with white specks and less saturated colors throughout.













This is the resulting yarn. Only the green, turquoise, and black colors from one end of the blank are showing, although if you look at the bottom of the left-hand cone, you can see a little of the purple, red, and yellow peeking out.




Then I got a little crazy with the red, turquoise, and blue dyes on the blank below.  This time I didn't want any striping - just random colors. I deliberately tried to make this bizarre and unappealing. I even added a little black here and there to make it even uglier. And I succeeded, didn't I?  Once again, I left the back alone so there would be some white speckling.  The gold color on the ends is waste yarn.

I do like the looks of the coned yarn.  I have no clue how this will knit up.  Will there be stripes?  Bizarre pools of color?  Appealing to the eye or downright disturbing? 

Then one of those serendipitous things happened.  Some friends had found a textured yarn at Tuesday Morning that they thought would make interesting ropes.  I happened to be near my local store and had a few free minutes, so I dropped in to see what they had.  I did find a few skeins to add to the ropemaking stash, but then I found sock yarn.  And not just sock yarn, but SOCK YARN ON MAJOR CLEARANCE!  Not having experienced sock yarn prices except for the bulk undyed yarn I bought for blanks, I bought a few balls of yarn and went my merry way.

When I got home, I started to add the yarns to my stash on Ravelry, which sent me in search of reviews and info on these yarns in online stores.  When I saw the regular retail prices of so many different types of sock yarns, I realized what a bargain I had found.  That sent me off on a quest to all the T.M. stores within driving distance.  Six of them.  And another two stores that happened to be on my route to other destinations.  Plus my good friend Holly, who is also on a mission to find yarn for ropemaking visited two other T.M. stores.  At last count, there are now some 60 or so balls of sock yarn in my newly established stash.  Now all I have to do is actually learn to knit socks.

A Portion of the New Sock Stash