Remember how I said I was having a fling with an old flame (aka socks, my first knitting love)?

Well, it’s official, I’m still fond of socks (even if my shoulder doesn’t allow for a long term relationship). And next month will mark fifteen YEARS since my first pattern came out. So I decided to spend a little time with some of those very earliest patterns.

And oh…oh I can see the enthusiasm of a new fascination stamped all over them! I really did just knit whatever amused me and then figure out how to write it down after the fact. And I find it oddly touching to look back on both the excitement and the optimism of those early patterns. There were good things there!

But (you knew there was going to be a but), because I was making stuff up on the needles as I went along and writing it down later, I didn’t give much thought to things like sizes (a lot of the early patterns only came in whatever size I made for myself) or how something can be easy to do but hard to describe (stack decreases up in a line until they wrap around is easy to do but takes three charts and a page of text to actually describe). So there are a lot of rough bits alongside the good things.

And for a long while, looking back on work from that long ago made me feel just straight up awful. (What was I thinking? How dare I think I was good enough to try that? Who did I think I was?) And those bad feelings were big enough that I didn’t want to deal with those patterns at all.

But these days I can see how excited I was. And how hard I worked to do the very best I could with what I knew at the time. And how that excitement and hard work got me from there to here, where I know so much more and can do so much better.

That’s not something to feel bad about. That’s something to be proud of. That’s cool as fuck!

And there’s absolutely nothing stopping me from going back and completely reworking a few of those earliest sock patterns so that they keep the good bits that were there all along but also get the benefit of fifteen years of practice. Because that is also cool as fuck.

And we’re going to have some fun!