I’ve been winding down from a mad sprint that began shortly after Thanksgiving and wrapped up this past week.  It’s been several months of multiple deadlines every week, and staying on top of all the personal and professional obligations has been difficult, to say in the least.

For the first time in what feels like forever Mr. Turtle and I got chores done on Saturday instead of Sunday. It’s our habit to do grocery shopping and laundry on the weekend, and over the last few months laundry has been done on Monday or Tuesday night (or even there’s been weeks skipped), and grocery shopping late on Sunday when we get home.  While it seems like a small thing, being able to get our chores done not at the last minute has been wonderful – once the chores are done I can relax into the weekend.

Since laundry had been skipped last week, there was a plethora of hand-knit socks that needed to get washed.  I like knitting my socks in superwash wool – they go into the washer with the rest of the clothes (cold or warm cycle) and then get pulled out to hang dry.  The rest of the clothes go in the dryer.

My highly technical way of drying socks – over the edge of the sock drawer.

Well, we missed a sock… which made it into the dryer.

Now, this is no great tragedy – I’ve had socks go into the dryer before, but I don’t particularly like it because in the dryer my row gauge shrinks. (I’m not sure why – perhaps because when they are hang drying the weight of the socks keeps the row gauge stretched out?)  Still, it was an interesting comparison between the line dry sock and the hand-dry sock.

Line dry sock left, dryer sock right.

This is a quick snapshot from the ipad – not particularly well exposed, but you can see the difference between the line dried sock (on the left) and the dryer sock (on the right).  The dryer sock is a good inch and a half shorter, and while the ribbing is pleasantly snug, the heel is nearly too small and if I put the sock on… my toes would be quite squished.

Luckily there’s an easy way of fixing the situation.  Now, let me make it clear – the sock on the right did not felt.  It just shrunk a bit – and got blocked in a particularly enthusiastic way.

So I dunked both of the socks in the sink filled with water, blotted them dry with a towel, and then hung them damp on my sock blockers – by tomorrow afternoon latest, they’ll be as good at new.

My socks, looking particularly nice on my sock blockers.