I have a confession. I am a sock knitter.

I’m not sure what happened. I was going along, knitting a little here and there, reading blogs about how fabulous hand-knit socks are and ignoring the hype… and then I knit a sock.

It started innocently enough; I made M some slipper socks for Christmas. The problem is they were easy to make and they came out looking like a pair. AND they were well received. Next thing I knew I was trolling through Ravelry‘s sock patterns, and digging out some lilac-colored alpaca from my stash. It still seemed like a manageable experiment. I can stop at any time, I told myself as I plowed through the Kalajoki socks. No problem.

No problem until I put them on and wouldn’t take them off for longer than I care to admit. They felt soooo good. Turns out all them sock knitters weren’t kidding about how comfy-fabby-warm hand-knit socks are.

M’s birthday was in February and I used the celebration as an excuse to knit him some socks. And, tellingly, to buy more sock yarn than needed.

By then I’d read a blog post about 12 sweaters knit in 12 months, and had seen that The Yarn Harlot knits a pair of socks per month, on top of her other projects. I just knit 3 pairs of socks in 3 months, I thought. I could totally knit 12 pairs in a year!

So March found me knitting my own pair of stripey socks with the leftover birthday yarn + some old green stash yarn. I’m just using up leftovers, I told myself, still in denial.

But then came April. And books about sock knitting were openly checked out of the library. And I shamelessly knit myself a big chunky pair of welly socks, telling myself that if next winter is anything like the one we’ve just escaped then I’ll be needing lots of socks. Thick socks. Long socks…

I’m in trouble, friends. We’re a third of the way through the year and the rash shows no sign of abating.

We spent last Christmas at my place so M didn’t decorate much. I thought it was sad that he didn’t have a tree, and I kept seeing these ones on flickr, and then the moths snacked on my green sweater and next thing you know I was making this guy.

I sewed the rick rack on before giving it to M and he got to “decorate” the tree, pinning on the buttons and pom-poms which I then glued in place.

For the base I used a scrap from an old screen-print mandala. I inserted cardboard to make the base flatter and used a wooden knob that was kicking around the studio for the tree trunk.

This year the crazy holiday crafter struck again when I decided to make an advent calendar on November 30th. Pictures soon.

Thanks to M for these photos.