Faithchick: Socks

Camy here, talking about socks.

Yes, I’m being weird. Bear with me, here.

I’m rereading the Harry Potter books, and Dumbledore has a great line, I think in the first book: “You can never have too many woolen socks.”

And I thought to myself, “How true is that!”

I am cold-blooded. At least, that’s what my husband Captain Caffeine says. I warm up or cool down to whatever temperature it is, and I’m usually unhappy with whatever temperature it is.

My feet and hands get cold the fastest, and my hands can get so cold that they’ll ache. As a writer, that’s not a good thing.

Now, I could crank up the house heat really high, but since it’s only me and the dog home, that’s a terrible waste of electricity.

Granted, I live in California and it’s nowhere near as cold as other states, but BECAUSE it’s California, there’s a certain amount of guilt involved in turning on the heater when the temperature outside is starting to rise. The problem is that inside my house, it’s still rather cold, and it gets very cold at night.

I started off wearing two pairs of cotton socks since I have tons of those (leftovers from my volleyball days when I’d change socks in between matches). However, two cotton socks just weren’t cutting it. My toes were still whiter than snow because I was so cold.

So, since I started knitting a year and a half ago, I decided to knit myself some wool socks.

Wool is much warmer than cotton, I knew, but it’s hard to find wool socks here because—you guessed it—it’s California.

However, the internet is a wonderful thing. I can buy 100% wool yarn or even the cheaper 20% wool/80% acrylic (read: machine washable and dry-able) yarn online.

My first pair of socks was 100% wool, and it was so warm, I wore it for three days in a row, washing it each night in the sink with Woolite.

I spent every spare moment this winter knitting socks when I wasn’t knitting Christmas presents. I switched to the washable wool yarns because they were cheaper, almost as warm, and I could throw them in the dryer rather than leaving them hanging all over the bathroom.

I also hit on the brilliant—BRILLIANT, I tell you—idea of making split-toe tabi socks so that I could wear my socks with my slipper Crocs (which my mom keeps sending me from Hawaii, where it’s become very popular). So I now wear my cushiony Crocs with my split-toe socks and be both warm and have cushy feet.

Here’s a link to a picture: http://camys-loft.blogspot.com/2008/02/geta-slipper-socks.html

So now that the weather is warming up even more, I have slowed down my sock making. But I will continue to churn out my “alien toe socks” all year so I’ll have a nice stash of them when the temperature drops (right now, I have 7 pairs, so I have to wash a load of laundry once a week so I can have enough clean socks).

You can never have enough wool socks.

Camy Tang is the loud Asian chick who writes loud Asian chick lit. She is a staff worker for her church youth group and leads a worship team for Sunday service. She also runs the Story Sensei fiction critique service. On her blog, she gives away Christian novels every Monday and Thursday, and she ponders frivolous things like dumb dogs (namely, hers), coffee-geek husbands (no resemblance to her own...), the writing journey, Asiana, and anything else that comes to mind. Visit her website at http://www.camytang.com/ for a huge website contest going on right now, giving away five boxes of books and 25 copies of her latest release, Only Uni.

Comments

I'm more of a funky sock kind of girl. Argyle, hearts, butterflies, stripes, etc. They aren't warm though, so that's where slippers come in;) Unfortunately, my husband hates my slippers--they make me look very housewife--so he hides them from me. Maybe wool socks would be the way to go.

Posted by: Angela Meuser | March 13, 2008 at 04:12 PM