Free-Range Knitter Read Free Page A

honesty, I do feel that you have a right to know what I have done with this pattern, the fruit of your needles, and I have enclosed a photo. It is best that you see this, since I have a terrible habit of telling people that it is so-and-so’s pattern (in this case, yours) even though I have altered it beyond recognition. (Again, I feel dreadful about this, but until there is some sort of recovery program for me I think it somewhat likely that both of us will continue to be tormented by my behavior, and warning you up front and admitting to my faults is all I can do.) Please don’t take any of this personally; the work was indefectible, masterful, and sublime before I took a fancy to it.
    Thank you,
Stephanie
    P.S.: I have also taken to referring to the panels as “openwork” rather than using the term “lace.” These socks are to be a gift for my brother, and I think it sounds more masculine.
    P.P.S.: After I changed the stitch count, reworked the heel, continued the panels, and opted to widen the panel, the stitch count isn’t quite working for the toe decreases. Please advise.

Glory Days
    I knit in the summer. All the way through the hot, steamy days, wool slips on my rather sweaty needles. Although Canadians are a northern people, and the summer here is very short, it can be so hot that it seems to produce a sort of amnesia in us. People come up to me while I’m knitting this time of year, and they stare like they can scarcely believe it’s happening. “Isn’t it a little hot for a hat?” they quip, and I get where they are coming from. The long and dark Canadian winter demands a certain fortitude, and the only way to build that fortitude is to have a few months where we deny its existence at all. “Mittens?” my countrymen wonder aloud. What on Earth would we need mittens for? It’s summer! As long as the flowers bloom and it’s a hundred degrees in the shade, our collective psyche sits on a patio in a sundress, drinking cold beer, going to the cottage for barbecues, and diving into the lake to cool off.
    The short, intense summer is so glorious, it’s like the autumn knows that the only way we Canadians could part withsummer’s long evenings and starry nights is if we are somehow bribed at the time it has to leave us. And in the autumn, every tree and plant seems to be making its apologies to us as though they were guests trying to leave a wonderful, wonderful party. Trees throw massive cloaks of color over their shoulders and let them fall to the ground. Pumpkins arrive in previously ordinary-looking gardens, and everywhere I go there are apples. I do not care very much to eat apples, but it would be impossible to not see the romantic lure of baskets of them piled high in red and green in the autumn. The vegetable shops overflow with the most beautiful of foods; squash and kale and beans are plentiful and inexpensive, and I wander the aisles thinking of making thick vegetable soups and homemade bread.
    This time of year the crisp chill returns to the air, and suddenly, after a few short months when we consider wearing wool a one-way ticket to heatstroke, or at the very least an unattractive and linty sweatbath, suddenly it is the most glorious time of year. It’s sweater weather.
    These slightly frosty days, when there is a nip in the air all day, these are the glory days for knitters. These are the days when people start wishing they had a hat. The evenings when they begin to think about tucking an afghan around them while they watch TV. Yea, verily, these are the days when a woolen throw over the back of a chesterfield stops being ornamental and starts being a pretty smashing idea. These weeks, the weeks before the people reach for their winter coats and conceal theirsweaters, these days before the central heat comes on—these are the mighty and triumphant days for a knitter. There will be days in the winter (months, actually, but I don’t like to think about it) when knitting will keep people