I didn’t always knit socks.  I used to knit important things like jumpers and, even, pièce de résistance, a skirt.  The skirt’s the biggest success I’ve ever had in the knitting department and I finished it as recently as two years ago. It’s in Jo Sharp’s DK Cotton in the colourway, Sage, and you can see the easy but complicated-looking pattern below.  Every time I wear this skirt, I get a thrill.  It’s slinky, comfortable and thank you, no, it doesn’t drop.

Since I discovered the joys of sock knitting, however, it’s taken over and now I knit little else.  There are so many reasons to like sock knitting.  Here are just ten of them:

1. It’s light and portable; no having to carry funny-looking bags you wouldn’t normally be caught dead with.  You can just stick it in a corner of your handbag, or a pocket, like I do.  In short, as Clive Robertson once said of the newsreader Richard Moorecroft and his penchant for hiding injured marsupials, it can be “secreted upon one’s person”.
2. You get to finish a project in a week or two.
3. A quick half row at the traffic lights makes them turn green.
4. It confers the most sturdy phlegmatism on the knitter …
5. … and a curious expansiveness on the watcher.  It’s no coincidence Agatha Christie had Miss Marple knit her way to finding out whodunnit (while poor old Hercule had to rely on fondling his moustaches).  I often have to interview people in my work, and I would love to pull out my knitting when asking questions; I’m positive I’d get some revealing answers.
6. There’s something peculiarly satisfying about hand knitting something as utilitarian as a pair of socks; like the bathmat I knitted last year, it’s something that was born to be machine-made.
7. Everyone thinks you’re so clever, and if you’re using self-patterning wool, they literally goggle.
8. It’s the ultimate hedge against boredom: the boredom of the long-distance knitter and external boredoms, as it were.  The waiting in queues kind.
9. At the end of the process one has a perfect present to give away, a present that’s surprising, intimate and useful.
10. There’s no sewing up.  Enough said?

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