I have had the inexpicable itch

to knit socks lately. I don't have anyone to knit socks for, and I don't even want hand-knit socks. I lose my store-bought socks (usually Costco and Target - I really splurge on my socks too) all the time. I've come to think of my dryer as a black hole for clothing, but especially socks. One difficult winter break, I came home with about two weeks worth of socks in my bag, and I went back to school with one pair. (The irony in this, I think, is that while I'm at school, and I, the irresponsible, feckless college student, am the one doing my laundry, I don't lose a single pair.) And I never wear the socks I knit last February (1 and 2). (On a related note, I recently gave one of those pairs of socks to my mother - the ones pictured in 1 - I didn't like the way the toe was done, and I literally never wore them. And she likes them. Score.)

All the same, however, I bought two balls of sock yarn this afternoon (Patons Grace in Azure), swatched this evening, and cast on for Eunny's Bayerische Socks. From the first moment I saw them, it was love, and I have itched to find the right combination of yarn and needles to find the right gauge to knit them. (I recently invested in a pair of size US0 circulars and got gauge with no sweat. It was meant to be.)

I am in something of a twilight zone in my life right now, being that most of the big things haven't been sorted out yet (I don't know where I'll be in six months, for example), and the date is something I only have a vague grasp of. So it was only this evening that I realized that I'm starting these socks right in the middle of Socktoberfest!

I recently heard (from two separate sources, actually) that there was a study where a group of people did a crossword no one had ever done before in a certain amount of time. They didn't do particularly well, as might be expected. But, when they did a crossword that had been in a newspaper a week before (that none of them had done) in the same amount of time, they finished most of it.

Sock knitting is in the air, and it seems I have caught the bug.

ETA:

Bayerische In Progress, originally uploaded by rubychan4.