Fiber to France to Finished Object

At the end of 2011, I had set up a Self-Imposed spinning club for myself to help me work through the fiber stash and also actually use the spindles I've collected over the years. At the time I didn't know I'd be paring down my belongings to one duffel bag and a backpack for the latter half of 2012. Whoops. Still worked through a lot of stash, I gotta day! Originally I had intended to spin this green Tunis from Gnomespun with this particular spindle, A Forrester.



The Forrester didn't fit in the whisky bottle cardboard holder tube thingy that is my spindle case, so it was a no-go. Instead I spun it on my kick spindle, with great joy.



Tunis, being a downs wool, is great for socks because it's hard wearing and doesn't felt easily. It also poofs up like WHOA when you put it in a bath.



I should have taken a photo of this skein next to another of the same weight. Easily twice the volume. So squishy. It was about 300 yds, and beefier than I had originally thought, but still doable for socks, albeit with fewer stitches around (ended up being 48).

I like to save my plain stockinette socks for travel, and I knit these ones almost entirely on a totally crazy day trip with my brother to Pont-a-Mousson, France, where my grandfather was wounded in 1944. He had, ill-advisedly, stuck his hand out of a foxhole to get a photo of where he was trying to get, which was to the top of the hill across the Moselle river from where he was positioned. He never made it up there. He traveled back to France sometime in the 1970s with his vet buddies to see what the place looked like then, and he got another photo. He gave copies of these to my brother so we could find the place ourselves.

The very definition of a wild goose chase ensued. The train travel was bizarre and involved 9 trains in one day and layovers in Luxembourg. It was so incredibly foggy it was hard to see more than maybe 50-100 ft ahead of you. Most of the businesses in the town were inexplicably closed that day. But we found the hill. It's barely visible in this photo, behind this cemetery (which itself received much damage in the battle).



We will show him all the misty, ghostly photos I took in the town when we visit him on Christmas. I think he will be very touched that we paid him the tribute of finding this place. He will no doubt regale us with more stories of what happened to him and his fellow soliders here as he loves to do. What else can I say, he's my Grandpa and I'd do just about anything to make him feel as loved as he's made me feel in my life.

The socks, though. These ones are for me. He's got giganto feet and there wouldn't have been enough yardage!