“Do you care what color I darn your socks in?”
“No.”

So here you go:

Sometimes “I don’t care” is such a wrong answer. And sometimes it’s so right.

Here we have an experiment of two kinds.

Like many places, we’ve had a ton of snow, and my husband has been the main, and sometimes the only shoveler. About two storms ago, he was clutching his forearm and flexing his hand. So I thought he could join Ray Allen in his use of an arm sleeve. Not even Ray, I don’t think, has one in Icelandic wool.

It also seemed like a good time to experiment with different stitches on a knitting loom. I feel a little defensive about the round knitting looms, their glowing plastic colors, coy misspellings in the most popular brand, and their perceived lack of sophistication. But I like them. For a cowardly knitter like me, they are a great introduction into knitting, especially that part of knitting that requires you to make complicated motions correctly every single time while another part of your brain listens to something else.

But to advance, you need to learn how to knit and purl on these. There are lots of instructions out there, but the best tutorial I got on rib knitting was this badly shot but lucid video. It shows the secret of purling on a round loom — taking the stitch off the peg and putting it back on.
 
So I experimented with different combinations of stitches and ended up with this:

And on the arm, it looks like this:

The yarn is Hosuband, 80 percent wool, 20 percent nylon, bought at Alafoss.

The sleeve and a little liniment seems to have helped. We’ll see how the experiment impacts the progress of my knitting skills and any future snow.

Long ago, I started a tube sock on a knitting loom my husband made for me:

And now that I’m sitting here willing my broken metatarsal to heal, I picked it up again.

This loom is a little bigger than the smallest loom on your basic knitting loom set. I needed a slightly larger one because tube socks made on the smallest one ended up too tight after washing. I believe this loom was made a from a large can of beans. This is a house that has roofing nails and duct tape lying around, so it was pretty easy to make.

And here’s one sock in use. Both socks are done, but the new owner spirited them away.

The yarn is two strands of Hjerte Sock 4, Danish superwash yarn (75 percent wool, 25 percent nylon), one strand pink, the other multi on a pink ground. (Yes, it’s a wretched flashless cell-phone photo. Sometimes you have to strike when the sock is on the foot.) Where did I get Danish yarn? In Iceland, at Alafoss.

Keep your feet warm, so your heart can be warm, too.