As I hinted yesterday, there’s a new sock on the needles and photographic evidence that he exists.

If you fell overboard, surely you’d like someone to throw you some knitting while you waited for rescue? Mind you, the fingers would numb pretty quickly in the waters of the San Juans. Winter temperature is about 45 degrees F., which gives you 15-20 minutes to climb out again undead, or so I’m told.

The best thing about this particular sock is that I only have to knit him once. He is a sample and a test knit of the gentleman friends of my secret red socks. He’s also my first taste of the new ShibuiKnits Sock color Man Blue. I love it. I loved it better when I thought this little sock fellow was going to be 80 sts and the denim hues were distributing themselves heterogeneously, but at 72 sts I have a nice steady spiral going on, and that doesn’t bother me too much.

Can we talk about US #2 needles, though? My fellow American knitters, we really must get on board with the metric system. I was going to knit this sock on two circular needles, but found that the new #2 Addi Lace needle I’d bought was 3mm, while the old regular Addi that I’d sized as a #2 on my Susan Bates needle gauge was, in fact, more of a #1.5 – only 2.5mm. (We can talk about Addi’s lamentable failure to come up with a permanent ink that doesn’t let the markings wear off the cord, or to engrave the sizes into the metal, some other time.) This would never do, and so I had to run out and buy some Japanese Clover dpns in US #2 = 2.75mm. This is as large as I’d care to go for ShibuiKnits Sock, which is a slender weight like Koigu. 3.0mm would produce too open a fabric for my taste in socks. The good news is that the Clovers are 5″ long, which is my ideal dpn length for socks, mittens, etc. They fit nicely in my hand without snagging their tail ends in my cuffs the way their 6″ brethren do, but they’re not so short as to be always bluntly stabbing me like the horrible 4″ Addi dpns, which no one should ever, ever buy. I would happily lead international days of protest against the Addi dpns, which are a stain on the escutcheon of this otherwise fine needle company.

The Man Blue sock enjoyed his nautical environment. He reminds me of the blue socks so ardently knit for men in uniform throughout our history. Jo knits blue stockings in Little Women, do you remember? These are dressier than anything knit for speed and function would have been, of course. Thinking about the history of blue socks reminds me — have any of you encountered Susan Strawn’s new Knitting America: A Glorious Heritage from Warm Socks to High Art? It has mixed reviews on Amazon, and my passion for history in general and the history of the knitting craft in particular makes me want this book to be good. No Idle Hands is a thorough and scholarly history, but there’s room on my shelf for a more approachable book with lots of photographs and vintage patterns.