Knit Sisters

You know, graduate school is mostly an enriching experience. Except that sometimes you spend a whole day reading things like this:

“The future, which as an open, multiple, contested, undefineable site, never exists in general, but is always pluralized in singularities—each future being different. The challenge to the sub-politics that thrive in a risk society, then, could be formed more effectively if we were to find ways of actualizing particular connections between technologies and their futures.”

I would like to actualize a particular future singularity in which these people would no longer be allowed to write books.

I’d rather be nosing bees than reading that crap. Even if I end up getting stung.

In the event—unlikely though I’m certain this is—that the above quote was not completely clear to you upon first reading, I, having had the benefit (if that’s the right word for it) of context, have rendered the following translation from Jargon into English:

The future hasn’t happened yet, so any number of different things could, in fact, happen. It would be better if some of those things happened rather than others. I sure wish we could figure out how to make the positive things happen rather than the negative ones!

See how simple?

My advice to you is this: as soon as some Jargon Cowboy starts talking about “multiple, contested, undefineable sites” that are “pluralized in singularities,” you should reach for your gun. Them’s fightin’ words!

In light of this obscurantist garbage abstract material that I am confronting, I’m sure you’ll see why I say that it is good for a person’s soul to knit during graduate school. Because knitting is an activity that is both sensual and concrete. I have, for instance, “actualized particular connections” between my yarn and needles to make this sock for Alex:

This Trekking XXL sock is most assuredly not “pluralized in singularities.” Although there are multiple, open, and contested feet in this picture, some have been actualized as paws.

Close-up:

Specs: Trekking XXL, color 71; “designed” by me from various sock components including eye-of-patridge heel flap, pointed toe (instructions from Nancy Bush), and k2, p1 rib for the leg and foot. U.S. size 1 needles, 69 stitches.

To soothe our (or maybe just my) troubled spirits, I have composed the following haiku, which are dedicated to Icarus, who has recently sprouted some new feathers and is taking a truly unseemly delight in draining away my life force with his 400+ stitch rows and his incessant demands for vodka tonics:

Yeah, I got feathers. And by the way, that’s “Mr. Icarus” to you.

Icarus Haiku #1:
Forty rows left now
Your feathers: pink agony
What was I thinking?

Icarus Haiku #2:
I think I hate you
although you are so handsome
in fall’s dappled light.

Icarus Haiku #3:
Five hundred stitches:
even the fabric of life
itself has fewer.

Icarus Haiku #4:
Night passes to day.
Autumn to winter then spring.
I’m still knitting you.

Have a good weekend everyone! I’ll be—does this sound familiar?—knitting Mr. Icarus. But you knew that already, didn’t you?

I’ve really done very little knitting, what with Red and her mom in town and all those wonderful tombstones to photograph.

I have a bit more of Alex’s Trekking XXL socks:

Their most exciting feature is their eye-of-partridge heel:

Get a load of that, will ya?

Eyes of patridges aside, I believe the fall weather and the turning leaves have gotten me into a rather Proustian mood.

Red’s recent visit may well have been my own personal madeleine, conjuring up tableaux of the past that I had not revisited for a long time. Tableaux in which she was a baby, and I was her twenty-one-year-old babysitter. So much had not yet happened.

Now the seasons are inexorably shifting.

Then again, my autumnal mood may have to do with my experience of campus as an “older” graduate student.

There are many strange and wonderful things about going to graduate school in your thirties, but the most magical and poignant moments occur in the fall, in September and October, when there is a slight edge to the air in the mornings but it isn’t really cold. Yet.

All the students are back on campus. There is a sense of renewal and possibility.

You feel the diffuse promise of the new school year even when you are nearly forty and you don’t have quite your whole life ahead of you.

And yet, my life on campus creates frequent Proustian moments when the past and the present collapse into a singularity. I look across the quadrangle and see a boy with curly black hair leap athletically into the air to catch a frisbee and I think, “Oh, look. There’s Phil.”

For just an instant, my friend Phil is there, embodied, eighteen years old, lithe, full of good cheer, airborne.

Then I remember that Phil would be forty or nearly forty now himself. He’s probably greying a little, his shoulders are rounding slightly, he is most likely more earthbound, he probably has his own children.

The leaves are turning.

In keeping with this bittersweet theme, on our way back from our walk yesterday afternoon, Shelley and I passed by the former Dame School:

The Old Dame ain’t what she used to be.

But then again, there’s the very real possibility that she’s becoming something better.

Dear Emily,
Mama and I would like to present to you a brand-new pair of Regia Bamboo handknit socks for your wearing pleasure:

And it only took Mama most of her adult life to complete this minor project! My, my, how does she do it?

These socks looked like they needed a good home, so we immediately thought of you.

Plus, Mama often says that she likes to knit socks for you because you alone among all her friends wear a size six shoe. She keeps saying something about how she “loves your little dogs,” but frankly I have no idea what she means.

I have surmised from context that is has nothing whatsoever to do with minute canines.

I helped Mama package your socks up and put them in the mail. After that exhausting trip to the post office, and a subsequent bout of “puppy madness” in which numerous fowl were brutally shaken and left for dead,

The carnage was unspeakable.

I relaxed with a bone:

Uh, Ma, did you remember to enclose a note reminding Emily not to fraternize with pandas while she’s wearing those bamboo socks?

I would like for you to know that at all times during the creative process, I refrained from stealing the yarn for your socks, although it was extremely alluring. The 40% wool content reminds me so of sheep and brings back so many fond memories of my youthful herding days.

And my most recent mutton-chop dinner.

But I refrained because I recalled an unfortunate incident between me and Mama a few years ago when—giddy on wool fumes—I snatched some of her yarn and “decorated” the backyard with it. I thought it greatly improved the appearance of the property and showed a certain creative élan on my part, but she was very angry and refused to speak to me for several hours.

Like she never got overenthusiastic and made a mistake! What explains this whole going-back-to-graduate-school-in-her-mid-30s business? Or the appalling Bianca incident? You know, when she made that whole sweater on size 0 and 1 needles?

Sigh. Mistakes were made. We’ve all suffered for them.

But I’ve always heard that it is important to make the effort to have a positive relationship with your parents, so I’ve given up yarn heists (and gnawing thoughtfully on book spines…and those enjoyable ruminative chews on Mama’s Manolo Blahniks that used to bring me such joy…). This has significantly reduced tensions in the home.

I was hoping, Emily, that the completion of your socks would mean she would move on to knitting a little something for me. A fair-isle dog sweater perhaps. Or some adorable little snow booties to protect my tender paws during the upcoming winter season.

The next project, however, seems to be for my Pop, Alex:

A muted Trekking XXL colourway that is oh-so-suitable for his mature masculine sensibility.

One thinks inevitably of the old saw about a picture being worth a thousand words.

Speaking of Pop, now that he has “passed his exam” (we dogs don’t take demanding exams of this sort; we find that they are destructive of pack ties), we’ve been able to do normal things together again.

Like take little strolls and admire the goldfish pond one of our neighbors has in his front yard:

A small, shiny, green frog presides over this pleasing little artificial realm. There is absolutely no indication that he will ever turn into a prince. Or that he would make good eatin’.

Mama and Pop even went to the movies:

Mama explained that the immense popcorn kernels, Coca-Cola, and Reese’s peanut butter cups that you see in this photo are all that remains of an ancient era when mega-junkfoods roamed the earth. Scientists believe that these mega-junkfoods died off in a mass extinction following the collision of the Earth with a massive extraterrestrial object thought by many to be composed primarily of tofu.

I have absolutely no idea what she is nattering on about, to be honest. But I certainly approve of the existence of megafoods.

Well, Emily, that’s about it. Hope you enjoy the socks.

Throw me a bone sometime if you get a chance. And I do mean that literally.

Much love,
Shelley

I have one word for you: Netflix.

Over the past two years, Netflix has revolutionized my relationship with our “home theater,” a lavish facility here Chez Stoux D’Ent that includes a two-bit DVD player hooked up to a 13-inch TV. No expense has been spared to bring high quality entertainment into our gracious home!

I was always the person who got to the video store and—put on the spot—could not think of one thing I actually wanted to watch. Half the time, I’d just get overloaded and confused and go home with nothing.

Those days are over. Thanks to Netflix.

(I swear I’m not getting kickbacks from the company for writing this. I swear. But if you, Joe Netflix Marketing, are reading this now, feel free to get in touch with an offer. Everyone has a price. And the price of a graduate student continues to drop as her dissertation drags on. It’s a little-known scientific law called the “Inverse Sell-Out Principle.”)

And I get a lot of knitting done while I’m watching my DVDs from Netflix. Shelley can vouch for this:

Oh, dear God, why? Why? Dogs don’t wear shawls!

We’ve been systematically watching all the extant episodes of Deadwood and, inevitably, Battlestar Galactica. Some of you who know about my uneasy relationship with sci fi and fantasy will peg Alex as the prime mover behind BSG. I’m just dying patiently waiting for the humans to triumph over the cylons—predictable inspiring as that will be—and for it all to be over.

In the meantime, I’ve made the Regia Bamboo socks, the ones I so cruelly abandoned in August when I took up with Icarus in Vegas, my BSG project:

Ever notice how no one ever knits on a space ship? I just want to point that out.

But I can highly recommend a delightfully maudlin, 1979 Soviet film we got from our “people” at Netflix entitled The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath.

Not only does Irony have Soviet production values that are so bad they’re good, but it features many strange and jarring jump cuts, enough to make you suspect that the editing crew was painfully underpaid, driven by unreasonable time pressures, and chronically drunk on Stoli.

Comrades, these were good and prosperous times in Soviet Union!

But if you watch it, watch it for the subtitles. I guarantee you will not be disappointed.

To be fair, most of the dialogue was translated pretty well (and, I want to emphasize, certainly far, far better than I could do from English into Russian), but the film also includes several songs sung by its main characters. Here things went terribly, horribly wrong.

Song lyrics that were presumably mellifluous, even moving, in Russian were evidently fed word-by-word into a Russian-English dictionary by someone with a rudimentary grasp of the English language and they came out on the other side limping and bleeding, maimed beyond all recognition:

“I cognize both wisdom and happiness…” Cognize?

“You have left your besom in the bathhouse/
And the trumpets are deaf making you…”
Anyone who can convincingly explain to me what “besom” means in this context wins a ball of Trekking XXL and an honorable mention in the design contest. Even if you don’t design anything.

And my personal favorite, which deserves a little context: the gist of the song—as nearly as I could make out through the fog of translation—was that it is potentially better to experience love that is not passionate, but steady and sustainable.

“I do not blush from a stifling heat upsurge/
Whenever your sleeved arm rustles my trousers.”
(For proper scansion—if, heaven help us, that nicety enters into this foul rendering at all—I believe that here “sleeved” is to be pronounced in two syllables, “sleeve” and “ed”.)

Let’s hear from the translator, shall we? What have you got to say for yourself, Boris Mikhailovich?

“Comrades, I translate Russian song into good English with large dictionary using first word I see in entry. Is usually most popular!”

Apparently, Boris Mikhailovich also provided translation services for other films, giving us such wonderful English titles as (I’m not making these up), “Galoshes of Happiness,” “The Old Bandit Chaps,” and “Karl Marx: Young Years.”

Only heaven knows what was intended by the original Russian titles, and heaven keeps its secrets. Even in the face of a stifling heat upsurge.

I got sick this week.  This is as inevitable as the sun coming up–every year when we go back to school, I end up catching a cold in the first few weeks.  It’s because all the snot-nosed urchins darling children bring their germs with them back to school and grade-school children are not known for their stellar personal hygiene.

I’m not severely sick, mind you, but sick enough.  Not sick enough to stay home, but sick enough to feel pretty crappy while at work.  Sick enough to be absolutely beat when I got home from school yesterday afternoon.  I lay down for “a little rest” and ended up sleeping 2 1/2 hours. 

Then, Harvey and I had our tae kwon do testing this morning.  It lasted quite a bit longer than I had expected.  Then we went to Wal-Mart.  I realize that going to Wal-Mart at noon on a Saturday shows a sad lack of defensive planning, but what can I say?  I’m sick and my faculties are not at their highest level.  In any case, 3/4 of the way through our shopping expedition, I started to feel shaky and broke out in a sweat.  Probably a combination of being (you guessed it) sick, not having eaten, expending all my energy free sparring, and having to deal with Wal-Mart at noon on Saturday.  I came home, lay down for another “little rest” and slept 3 hours.  (Why yes, I would like some cheese with my whine.  Thanks for asking.)

All of the above is a long explanation of why this post is late.  See, I’m sick.

I have, however, made some progress on the sherbet socks.  I finished the first one:

 

Here’s a detail of the toe.  I thought about using a different toe shaping, like a star toe or something, but when it came right down to it, I crapped out and used my standard short-row toe as per Priscilla Gibson-Roberts.  I’ve used this heel/toe shaping so much I can do it with one eye closed, and I just didn’t feel I had the energy to conquer a new toe shaping that might have involved math or something.  (Because, well, I’m sick.)

I started casting on for the second sock, but that’s not a very compelling picture. 

My next sock project will be for Rob, because he needs a new pair of socks for his new job, I think.  I know this flies directly in the face of “The Year of Knitting for Me,” but there it is.  A decision made in a moment of sickness weakness.  I collect sock yarn in sedate, male colors for him. (He will wear self-striping yarns, but only if they’re subdued.  By the way, this is a great way to build your stash–“But honey, that yarn is for socks for you!”)  Two candidates for the position of next socks:

 

Rob’s leaning toward the grey colorway.  I myself kind of like the sand colorway.

Alex, I’m sorry I missed your birthday!  I hope you had a good day and a good birthday week.  I do have a little something for you, which I’ll try to get in the mail this week.  Happy quarter century to you!

In answer to a couple of questions:

Yes, I think any leaf-themed original design is fair game for the contest, even if it was designed at some other time. 

And Barbara asked about when I learned to spin and if it was hard.  The first part of that question is easier to answer than the second!  I taught myself to spin on a drop spindle in 2002, so I really have not been spinning that long.  I went to NY Sheep and Wool in the fall of 2001 and discovered that the yarns I coveted most were the handspun yarns that people had for sale.  Instead of buying these yarns, I bought myself a drop spindle, some roving, and a spindle spinning book.  I kind of put them aside until that winter, when I just decided that I was going to figure out how to spin, no matter how long it took!  I looked at my book, gathered a few little tips, and dove in.

My family jokes that they always knew when I dropped the spindle on the floor, because I would let fly with a “Shit!”  And I guess that leads to the second part of the question:  is it hard?  Like many things that you do with your hands, spinning takes practice.  Somewhere I remember reading that when you are learning to spin, you should spin at least a little bit every day, to really cement the feel and the process into your muscle memory.  Like knitting, it’s a skill that you hold in your hands, and no amount of studying is going to make you proficient without the actual practice. 

Personally, I think you just have to be determined to learn and make up your mind not to give up.  I also believe that it’s a good idea to learn on a top-whorl drop spindle, so that you can really get the feel of drafting before you have to learn to manage a wheel.  It’s also a much, much smaller outlay of money–you can decide if it’s really something you want to pursue.  (A decent beginner spindle can be purchased for $10 or $12–I learned on a $10 Louet top-whorl.)

And speaking of spinning, my progress on the lime superwash:

                                                         I’m getting there, slowly but surely.

I’ve been working on the sherbet socks, too.

                                  Halfway on the first sock.

Hey, here’s a funny picture of my little (ha, ha) feet wearing my one half-sock on the spinning wheel treadles.

 

Hugo thinks this whole half-sock thing is highly suspicious.

                                     “Do I have to wait until you’re done with those before you take me for a walk, or what?”

(I’m still working on the secret project, as well.  Of this we will not speak…)

Don’t you just love air travel? I know I do.

You know what my favorite part is? Well, it’s when the pilot comes on the intercom with his aw-shucks-folks drawl he copied from Chuck Yeager (I am freely borrowing from Tom Wolfe here, but frankly I just cannot improve upon his description) and says, “Way-ell folks, it looks like we’re gonna to be headin’ into a little light chop up here fer a bit, so if you’ll just make sure those seat belts are fastened low and tight, we’ll get you on through to some smoother air jest as soon as we can.”

I know that most of these dudes used to be fighter pilots for the military and therefore are used to all kinds of airborne shenanigans—up to and including taking enemy fire. So when I hear one of them start drawling on about “a little light chop,” I prepare to lose my lunch.

My tolerance for turbulence has fallen off in recent years.

So while I was working on these bamboo socks,

we get the usual announcement about a little light chop. I’m not happy about it, but I go on knitting the sock. That is, until the flight attendant comes on and says, “We are asking at this time that all passengers return to their seats and remain there with their seat belts fastened.”

Fine.

Then he adds, “In the event of an emergency evacuation (emphasis mine), passengers are advised to leave all cabin luggage behind.”

Under my breath, I utter what I suspect will be my last words on this earth, deeply profound words that will resonate down through the ages:
“Oh shit.”

Then I start to think, is this his idea of a joke? And besides, do they really have to say that anyway? If the plane is in the process of crashing, do they really think that I’m gonna stand there at the evacuation slide screaming, “Not without my backpack! I will not leave this plane without my yarn and my travel snacks!”

Course not. I could easily leave behind those travel snacks.

Since I’m writing this now, you already know that we didn’t all die in a fiery crash. And in fact, after I kicked that flight attendant in the shins said a fond farewell to our flight crew, I trundled on over to the Tucson Budget Rental Car counter where they proceeded to upgrade me to this:

Feast yer eyes upon her: a red Mustang convertible. Gimme those keys!

There are those who say that the four most beautiful words in the English language are, “I love you, darling.”

Personally, I’d vote for “unlimited mileage, limited liability!”

Had I known that they were going to give me this car, I would have planned to stay in Tucson longer. Like say, five or six years.

But even though I’ll be rambling on by the end of the week, here’s where I’ll be working for the next couple of days:

Otherwise known as the home of the:

Tucson has been experiencing some dramatic desert thunderstorms that seem to come out of nowhere and roil up into clouds like these:

They are rawther impressive. I would not have been entirely surprised had God himself had emerged from behind this cloud and delivered a series of commandments.

Self-portraits with beads and bland hotel room:

I am really quite easily entertained.

Next stop: Fabulous Las Vegas. And yes, I will be doing dissertation research there. Research for my dissertation on blackjack and free cocktails risk and the nuclear establishment. More soon…

I’ll just admit it: I’m stalled on Rogue’s sleeves. Lorinda has suggested that I just forget the sleeves and use the existing hooded sweater-vest as a vehicle to show off my tattoo. Appealing though this idea is, winter will come and I’ll be sorry. This really raises the question: could there be a widespread disorder known as “First Sleeve Syndrome?” Or am I the only one afflicted?

With Bianca, it was the second sleeve that was the heartbreaker. I briefly considered sawing off my left arm instead of knitting the sleeve, but I ultimately saw sense.

Obviously, I have a sleeve problem. Of course, as you know, the first step to recovery is admitting that you have a problem.

In the meantime, I finished those pink cotton/wool blend socks:

The feet of diverse species can coexist peacefully together if given an appropriate and gradual introduction.

I’ve also been down to our local CVS to see if I can find a remedy for my sleeve malaise and, of course, to see my favorite CVS cashier.

The first time I encountered her was a few months ago, when I tried to buy Alex some allergy medicine, but found that their stock was utterly depleted, what with the run on pseudoephedrine products by allergy-sufferers and methamphetamine addicts alike.

So, having failed at my central task, I instead bought a Diet Dr. Pepper, which I paid for with exact change, and here I do mean coins. I gave them to the cashier. She looked at the coins as if I had just put seven little turds in her palm.

Now that’s exactly the kind of dynamic, positive approach to a job that has made this nation great!

In an interaction with this same cashier a couple of weeks later, I attempted to jolly her along with a friendly, “How’re you doing?”

In a tone of infinite weariness, she replied, “Just as miserable as ever.”

Heh. I love that response, although admittedly my warm feelings toward this incredibly negative cashier are probably a direct result of my three strange and not-so-wonderful years in Berkeley. Berkeley, the town where no one would ever have said such a thing. It’s just not how things are done out there. Either you get the phony-baloney Teflon cheeriness or the “I-am-one-with-the-universe-and-I-transcend-lowly-human-things-like-mood-by-ceaselessly-doing-yoga-and-grounding-my-spiritual-life-somewhere-between-Buddhism-and-Scientology” routine.

I don’t know about you, but I just can’t get any traction in those kind of exchanges. What am I supposed to say? “Sorry, pal, but I do not believe your absurd story about transcendence, yoga, and Scientology. I suspect that you too run out of toilet paper at inopportune times, experience seasonal flooding in your basement, and have been known to yell at your children.”

Misery, however! I know from misery.

I told the cashier that I appreciated her honest response and I paid my bill in exact change: a $5 bill and six coins. True to form, she regarded the coins as though they were six little turds. And truly, it warmed my heart.

There was no remedy available for “First Sleeve Syndrome,” however.

In the wild, hand knit socks sometimes use reflective surfaces as a form of camouflage, making it impossible for predators to discern which are the real socks and which are the mere simulacra.

I would like to linger for a moment here over Sarah’s suggestion that we henceforth refer to her as, “Sarah, Woman of Transformation.” Not only is this incredibly apt, it certainly makes a whale of a lot more sense than, Alchemy, Yarns of Transformation. I hasten to add that I adore and covet Alchemy Yarns (of Transformation) and that I have warm feelings toward their delightful Charles Rennie Mackintosh design elements, yet…this whole “Yarns of Transformation” business is just…so…well…Sebastopol, CA.

In the name of great yarn and even greater dye jobs and colorways, however, we will forgive them.

Meanwhile, my sister, the Woman of Transformation, continues to transform piles of roving studded with “vegetable-matter” into lovely yarns like these. As “Sister of Woman of Transformation,” I am transforming her handspun into Rogue:

Cunning kangaroo pocket, wouldn’t you say? Sadly, with the incredible heat in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, we have experienced a work-slowdown on Rogue. Cotton/wool blend socks, however, continue to be knitted at previous rates of production, in accordance with the goals of the most recent Five Year Plan set out by the Supreme Knitting Soviet:

On the positive side, the heat and sun have produced limited successes in horticulture,

which is miraculous given that my gardening strategy rests on three pillars of strength: ignorance, absentmindedness, and Darwinian survival of the fittest. Here in Darwin’s garden, only the strong survive!

Other parts of the yard, meanwhile, are increasingly jungle-like. Here, an unidentified beast, captured by Wildlife Photographer Ellen, checks the underbrush for domestic felines and hidden bones.

To come full circle, our alchemical fiber friends out in Sebastopol actually have something to say about gardening on their website: “Without seed no fruit can be born, without soil no seed can grow.” These quasi-mystical, and yet somehow completely obvious, words of Isaac Holland’s remind us that it isn’t just ignorance, absentmindedness, and Darwinian tenets that make a garden grow. It’s also soil. And seeds.

A little Miracle-Gro doesn’t hurt either, I hear.

Thanks to Sarah for the post on the English five-pitch combs! Since I neither spin nor comb, I learned a great deal. Let’s be honest, y’all. That is a whole other level of craft and, even more to the, um…point, that is a whole other level of tools. Now that I’ve gotten a load of those combs, I’ve begun to suspect that my sister is living a double life: knitter, spinner, mother, and educator by day; Fiber Ninja and CIA Special Operative in Interrogations by night.

Be afraid. Be very, very afraid.

I bet Langley sends her all the really tough cases, the guys who won’t crack under any kind of pressure: “All right, Larry, if he won’t talk, I guess we’ll just have to call in…The Fiber Ninja. With her English five-pitch combs!” “Oh, God, no! No! What do you want to know? I’ll tell you anything! Anything!”

Half the time, she doesn’t even have to show them the combs. Just the idea of them is enough to strike terror in their hearts and loosen their tongues. Now that’s what we call good tradecraft! In the “intelligence” biz, that is. (You remember that book, Everything I Needed to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten? What a lie. Everything I needed to know I learned from John Le Carré novels…)

Now, if I’ve learned anything from John Le Carré, it’s that my sister is going to deny all this. She’s going to claim she has nothing to do with the so-called “intelligence community.” You can humor her if you like, but we know the truth.

Meanwhile, although I made little-to-no progress on the Wedding Noodles over the weekend, I made the first sock of a pair (tastefully displayed with dog):

Shelley liked this sock more than I expected. Here’s what happened when I tried to retrieve it:

“I, Conquistador Shelley, claim this sock for Spain!”

I’ll get it back eventually. Though I may have to stoop to shameless and undignified bribery with Milk-Bones and Greenies.

Anyway, it really isn’t all that urgent because I have a broken little toe and can’t actually wear any enclosed shoes or socks. That situation recently got worse because, having followed the recommendations in Highly Technical, Advanced Medical Advice of Tomorrow…Today! (i.e., “tape your little toe to the one next to it”),

I found to my horror that after four weeks the skin on those toes was looking something close to gangrenous. For obvious reasons, I’d hate to lose my toes, so I cooked up a knitted solution that would bind the toes together, and yet let the skin breathe! The Koigu Toe-Stabilization Sleeve, in progress:

And in use:

I’m pleased to report that after only two days of wearing the Koigu Toe-Stabilization Sleeve, I have experienced significantly less swelling and dramatically less gangrene. The Koigu Toe-Stabilization Sleeve really works!*

*Results not typical. The Knit Sisters do not guarantee relief from broken toes or gangrene through toe sleeves or other knitted garments.