Posts in category 'knitting'

So here we are in the middle of May, and while I still have a fair bit of time until the big ride on July 20th and 21st, I still have a long way to go to reach my $2,500 fundraising goal. In past years I’ve been truly amazed by how generous and supportive my friends and family have been; just through internet advocacy and a little gentle… let’s call it nudging, I’ve typically managed to get well past the half way mark. Stir in generous employer support and a bit of self-donation to get over the hump, and hitting that $2,500 goal, while difficult, was quite doable.

But, as I’ve mentioned in past posts, without that employer support, this year is going to be tougher than usual. Fortunately, that also means I have a lot more time to actively raise funds, which brings us to my first event: a hand-knit sock raffle!

So, way back in the before time, I decided to attempt to knit a pair of socks. Not one to do things the normal way, I opted for the toe-up lessons from Denise Powell on the now defunct socknitters.com. The thing that really attracted me to toe-up was the idea that I could just try socks on as I went rather than trying to nail the sizing up front, something that, as a not very confident knitter, I didn’t think I had a hope in heck of getting right.

Now, many years later, I can’t imagine knitting socks any other way. Toe-up just feels inherently intuitive to me (though, admittedly, it isn’t without its downsides, as most patterns are set up for cuff-down socks, which means you’ve gotta do extra work to reverse them).

In part, I think this is because of Powell’s approach to teaching sock knitting, which did away with teaching the reader to follow a rote pattern, but instead focused on the structural elements of socks and how you knit each component. This gave the reader a much more fundamental understanding of sock construction, thereby helping the knitter build that necessary intuition that allows for later improvisation.

Well, I decided to take a crack at writing a new set of lessons inspired by Denise’s work and my own experiences both knitting socks and teaching others to do the same. I hope this is useful to aspiring sock knitters out there!

I absolutely love making socks. As a project, they’re relatively quick, by now very familiar, a small canvas for a bit of experimentation, and in the end, always useful. After all, who doesn’t need another pair of socks?

Unfortunately, that’s also caused me to amass quite the collection of sock yarn over the years. In fact, I spent a good part of 2019 making sock after sock after sock thanks to our indulging in a Michael’s Boxing Day sale back at the start of last year.

But, I’ll be the first to admit, the stash has been building up for a long time, now.

As a result, the yarn that I used in this project–a lovely, variegated yellow yarn who’s label I’ve apparently lost–has been sitting in my collection for a couple of years now, having been pushed down the queue by more recent acquisitions. However, I finally decided to do something with it!

Now, as a toe-up sock knitter, it’s always a bit trickier to find patterns, and so I’ve often settled for coming up with my own designs. However, this time, I decided to try my hand at converting an existing cuff-down pattern to toe-up.

These socks are based off of the My Cup of Tea Socks pattern (hosted on Ravelry), which I then altered, both to convert the pattern to toe-up, and to make the motif a bit larger.