Posts in category 'knitting'

  • 2025 Tour Raffle

    Better late than never, right? Were you excited but disappointed when you didn’t win a pair of hand knitted socks last year by donating to my Tour Alberta for Cancer fundraising campaign? Well now you have another chance! Support my efforts to raise money for the ACF and earn a chance to own a pair of socks made by yours truly!

    Donate Here

    Or following the link to the post to learn more!

    One of three pairs of knitted socks I made for the 2024 tour.

    So the Tour this year is on July 19th and 20th, which puts it just one short month away. And this is the first post to mention the Tour Alberta for Cancer or my associated fundraising campaign. I am remiss.

    There are certainly reasons for that–my life has seen some fairly profound changes as I ended my career break and re-entered the workforce–but it’s about time I wrote something given this is a particularly special Tour for me as my wife Lenore rides with me for the very first time!

    But I also need your money!

    Each year we riders raise a minimum of $2,500 for the Alberta Cancer Foundation, an organization to which I have a person connection given how cancer has impacted my family and friends. While my campaign this year is going surprisingly well despite a lack of effort on my part–as of this writing I’m at over $1,800, which ain’t bad!–I still have some work to do.

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  • My Cup Of Tea Socks (Reversed)

    A quick write-up of my process for converting a cuff-down sock pattern to toe-up as part of my most recent project.

    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.

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