Socks, Socks, and more Socks

How are you all holding up?  The pandemic just does not seem to end.  I have been silent during the last year.  I don't know about you, but I have hard a hard time tapping into the creative juices.  I have piddled around with stuff, still weaving, a little spinning... but for the most part I have navigated towards comfort.

As a coping mechanism, I found myself knitting socks.  I first learned to knit with socks - it was the one thing I wanted to make.  It was a great lesson and after one pair, I never wanted to make another.

Then my mom was diagnosed with cancer.  She was going to start treatments and I wanted to make her something that would make her happy.  I knitted her a pair of colorful and happy socks in her favorite colors.  They were the "**** cancer" socks.  They were very awful - Haha! I had never done colorwork and I did not float the colors well.  They were cute but not comfortable.  Thus ending the foray into socks for a second time.

Fast forward to last fall.  She was going through treatments again and having a very hard time with the chemo.  She was in and out of the hospital and life was full un uncertainty.  I started making socks again.  I found the fish lips heel and toe up socks were my jam.  I was making a pair each week.  It was the only thing that I could control and there was so much comfort in the routine on socks.

I knitted socks for gifts, for my mom, for others at the cancer center, for family, for the kids.  I could not stop, until I did.  At some point last spring, I was done with socks.  I did not need that distraction anymore and I moved past the obsession.  

I am grateful for yarn and fiber to help get through difficult times.  I have tools I need and yarn plays a big role in my sanity!

What about you? How are you coping with the stresses and changes that have come with our "new normal"?  What do you do for comfort?