Knocked our socks off

While many kids around the country are already out of school, the schools here are just now wrapping up. I tend not to do individual thank you gifts for teachers. I figure they have enough “stuff,” and I’m just not a big gift giver in general. I’ve noticed that some knitters do a lot of hand knit gifts for their children’s teachers (Kay of Mason Dixon Knitting seems to do them regularly). I am in awe of knitters who have the speed to make gifts at that level.

Because I knit so slowly, I tend to be a bit more discriminating about whom I knit gifts for. This year E is in Fourth Grade. She’s definitely enjoyed this year, and as her parents, we have too. At the beginning of the year, her teacher set a precident for the kids to aim high and “knock her socks off.” She kept a pair on a little clothes line in the classroom and when all the kids in the class did well on their homework she’d pull them off the line. That got me thinking – by mid year it was evident that it was E’s best year at her school. I decided I wanted to make her teacher a pair of socks. I also decided I had better give myself plenty of time to do it.

I did manage to finish the socks. I finished them last week, washed them and blocked them tonight. I’m happy with how they came out, and so is E. I made a label and we’ll be able to give them to her teacher this week. I hope she likes them, but more than anything I hope she knows how much we all appreciate all her hard work this year.

The pattern is Rushing Rivulet – Riverbed from Cat Bordhi’s New Pathways for Sock Knitters: Book One. This is the second pair of socks I’ve knit with the Riverbed pattern and I really enjoy it. Miss C is a big conservationist, and much of their science unit this year focused on the Hudson River and local tributaries, so I thought the Rushing Rivulet pattern was particularly appropriate for her.