Still trying to recapture the ol’ knitting mojo. It’s a good thing my grad knitting group cancelled itself today, because I’d have showed up with nothing but gauge swatches to work on.

While I try very hard to answer the important questions of pre-knitting, I’d like to share a few of my triumphs from The Great Radio Silence Of Aught-Eight. I’m trying to keep EXTREME SOCK BLOGGING to a minimum, but I finished these recently and I feel pretty good about them:

You’d never know it, but these are the Gentleman’s Railway Sock from Nancy Bush’s Vintage Socks. I got about four inches in with the railway stitch, and realized that the K2P1 cuff rib suited the dark Ultra Alpaca better than a lot of indistinguishable knits and purls.

The only mods were the allover rib, the stripes, and the use of “heel stitch” (k1, sl1 on WS rows) on the heel flap. I even completed the proscribed calf shaping, which seemed like total overkill to me. Did Victorian gentlemen really have calves so shapely that they needed a half an inch of extra ease at the cuff of a regulation-length sock? I fired up my Time Potato to travel to the past and find out.

The answer was, “no”.