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!
Or following the link to the post to learn more!
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.
Continue reading...- (https://b-ark.ca/eO4Ycg)
The final pair of 2024 Tour Alberta for Cancer socks. Another rainbow yarn but this time with a simple wavy motif and some cables I threw in for fun.
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I’ve posted about these a lot so apologies if you’ve seen them before. FO post number two for the Tour socks, this time some colourwork!
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Finally some FO posts from my Tour Alberta for Cancer sock knitting projects. For this first pair I worked up an old familiar pattern in a lovely purple.
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Another Tour raffle prize done! Well, assuming they end up fitting the winner, anyway…
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Man it was a whole journey to get to sock number one in this pair. I copied the motif from some photos, then improvised the slip stitch sole and striped gusset, all while re-learning Fair Isle knitting. Turns out, when you make something up as you go, you make a lot of mistakes and find as many design choices that don’t work as ones that do! But I took lots of notes so the second one should be much smoother sailing! I hope…
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First pair of Tour socks completed, shipped, and received, and the second pair is started! I haven’t done colour work in a long time and you can tell (or, at least, I can)…
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A beautiful day for a training ride! As a reminder, the second of three draws in the hand knitted sock raffle is coming up in June 19th, so donate now to get in on the action:
https://b-ark.ca/2024/05/16/tour-alberta-raffle.html
2024 Tour Raffle
So when I’m not raising money for cancer research I’m a pretty capable knitter with a specialty in much-sought-after socks. Well, now is your chance to get a pair of your own! Contribute to my fundraising campaign and enter a draw for a pair of custom, hand knit socks! Click through to the post to find out more!
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!
Continue reading...- (https://b-ark.ca/_mmCKI)
First attempt at a little stuffy. A bit rough in spots and my joining is horrible but in the end it turned out alright!
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I warned you. Sock knitting blog. A repeat of the last pair but in a different colourway.
Sock Knitting 101
Someone recently asked me for pointers to good sock knitting lessons. Not a pattern. Lessons on how to really grok knitting socks. So I decided to try throwing something together, specifically for how I approach toe-up socks! Warning, this is definitely a first draft, so it’s very possible I’ll come back and update this post to fix things up…
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!
Continue reading...- (https://b-ark.ca/sGY8Y8)
Apologies to anyone who follows me, but apparently this is now a sock knitting blog…
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Another sock done (first of a pair)! Like my last pair, these socks have a slip stitch bottom and then I added a 3x1 rib on the top and leg for a little stretch and texture. Meanwhile I finished the second toe, and I actually tried to make the stripes match this time….
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I’ve been wanting to try a reinforced slip stitch bottom for a pair of socks for a while now, and after some experimentation I think I’ve got it! The result is thick and squishy and I hope quite durable.
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Fun fact: while this may look like a single sock, it is in fact 2.5 socks. See, I finished the toe and foot up to the gusset, changed my mind on the design, ripped it out, started again, finished it, didn’t like the fit, then unravelled it and did it again. But it turned out great! Stay persistent, y’all, and never be afraid to rip a piece apart and start over.
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Victory is mine! These socks are my first completed knitting project since the Before Time, and you know what? I still got it.
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So I went to the #Edmonton Expo this weekend and discovered Tee Turtle was there and selling this shirt. As you can imagine, it spoke to me…
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Man, you can tell I’m rusty: It took me three tries and a lot of tinking before I remembered how to knit up a gusset properly…
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Well, after a lengthy knitting hiatus, with the sabbatical upon me it’s time to get back to it! I’m hoping to get not one but two pairs of socks done for September, the first started recently the second that’s been sitting on needles for… two years…?
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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