Occasionally, my husband looks at me and says “my toes are cold. I have no hand-knit socks.” Now, many people would say it was cold hearted of me to live with him for going on four years now and have not knit him socks. These people would be the ones who don’t know that he wears a size 13 wide (US Men’s) shoe. Thems some big, wide feet. And because he is frequently too warm, they can’t be too heavy. And, they need to be knit at a tight gauge so that they won’t wear out in the first month that he wears them. Enter some lovely yarn and I embarked on what is proving to be a somewhat arduous journey.

Knit to 9 stitches per inch on very pointy size zero crystal palace bamboo double pointed needles, these socks started with a figure 8 cast on. In that cast on, you cast on a smaller number of stitches and increase to create a toe pocket. In this case, that number? 40. Total number of stitches in a single round once I finished the toe increases? 88. To give me an unstretched size of 9.75, 90% of my husband’s foot circumference. Once the toe was done I knit a little further with pagoda (the orange) to get a toe that looked right before I switched to the seaweed (green yarn). And then I just kept knitting for, well, a while.

Right now I’m stalled a bit, I haven’t been knitting much. I’ve reached the point where I need to be thinking about the heel. Because my husband also has big ankles, the afterthought heel I was originally going to use would make it difficult to make sure the sock will fit up and over his heel. My current thought is to put the sock on waste yarn, knit a heel (using the same figure 8 technique I’m using for the toe) and graft it on, then go back to knitting as scheduled, up the leg. I just need to get around to picking it back up. Stay tuned for the further adventures of the giant man-socks.

And now, apropos of nothing, I give you the pig butchering guide:

Mmmm, pig.