Category Archives: Special Projects

Easter Socks

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Tonight is the first in three days of services for the Easter Triduum, Holy Thursday. There is another service tomorrow for Good Friday, and then the Easter Vigil, at sundown on Saturday.

There are colours associated with each of these days – Black for Holy Thursday, Red for Good Friday and Yellow for Easter Vigil.  Red and Black socks, I have. But this year I decided to knit myself some yellow socks to wear, with my yellow golf shirt, to the Vigil service.

I ended up making two pairs, and I haven’t yet decided which I will wear.

This first pair is knit with 100% Pure Milk and I added in a strand of 20 denier lycra throughout the entire knit. This is a soft butter yellow colour # 940, the reason I chose it. The milk yarn, by Viking of Norway comes in 50g balls which are about 165 m. It took me about 2.5 balls to knit this pair of size Large socks with the 72 cylinder on the Verdun 47.

I used a tension of 1/4 turn looser than my standard tension for this size. Partly because I was adding a strand of lycra, and partly because the milk yarn has little elasticity so is a little stiffer on the knit – like a pure cotton or a high content silk. That gave me a good gauge. The intial row of ribbing was quite a tough crank, and after that I would call it ‘stiff’.

This is a beautiful fibre. When first knit it feels on the canvas side, but after a wash or two its just like the softest cotton or merino. I knit myself a test pair of these in blue last year, without lycra. They were extremely soft, yet have been very durable. However, without the lycra they didn’t want to stay up so well and I’ve since been wearing them as house-socks or bed-socks on a really cold night.

This second pair is a much brighter yellow. It is not quite a primary sun yellow – I added a tiny bit of black to the dye pot when I dyed this, just to take the edge off the colour. This is my own lambs wool blended 70% with 30% nylon, woolen spun in a single ply.

The pattern is my adaptation for Sock Knitter of Nancy Bush‘s Welsh Country Stockings.

I actually increased the length of the leg in this pair by about an inch and a half so I can wear them in my hiking boots. I love the loft of this fingering weight yarn – like a half weight sport socks – perfect for warmer weather hiking – comfort from the loftiness, absorbancy from the wool, strength from the nylon. But without the weight of the heavier socks I wear in cold weather.

As a cantor, I’ll be in the choir loft (out of sight) on Saturday night, so I’ll likely be in sock feet. I wonder which pair I’ll end up wearing…

Peapod Square Heel

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Here is a pair of Small+ socks knit with my own 75/25 Wool/Nylon fingering weight in Peapod (which is looking more blue-ish in my photos). Knit with the 72 cylinder and 36 ribber on the Verdun 47.

I’ve done an Eye of the Partridge stitch on the hand knitting style square heel with gusset, and a reverse e-wrap selvedge on the 1×1 rib top. I’m much happier with my gussets on this pair, having tweaked my tension on the slip stitches where the gussets link with the instep.

Below is a rough sketch showing the sequence of work I use in my knitting:

Diagonal Cable Socks

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Here’s a project I knit from Jenny Deter‘s book, Just Socks.

For this pair I used Pattern #5 – Small Diagonal Cable Socks. I knit with my own 75/25 Wool/Nylon fingering weight in colour Lavender Sock.

These are Size Small, knit with the 72 cylinder on the Verdun 47.

The pattern works in a 20 row repeat and Jenny leaves it to the knitter to work that into their own size. For a Size Small I began with the recommended 20 rows of 1:1 ribbing, and then I knit 2.5 repeats of the pattern before switching out the back of the heel to stockinette. I continued the pattern on the front of the sock for 1 more repeat (so, the last half of the repeat already started, and then the first half of another repeat – for a total of 3.5 repeats.)

After a standard heel, I carried on with the pattern where I left off, beginning with the second half, then two more full repeats, plus 4 more rows of the pattern to get to my desired length.

Then I switched out the remaining rib needles so as to knit a final 6 rows in full stockinette.

Because the cable pattern carries on from the leg all the way down the foot, it is necessary to leave the ribber on the csm all the way up to the last 6 rows. So you really don’t know if you’ve buggered the sock until its almost done. (Granted, you can see the leg by the time you’re working on the foot.)

I wouldn’t describe this pattern as difficult, so much as pernickety. There is a lot of stitch manipulating – easy in itself – opportunities abound to leave a latch unopened. (Check. Check. Check again.)

This is a very satisfying pattern and I really like the look of it. I think the paler semi solid colourway I used shows the pattern off very well, where a darker or more multi colourway may not.

 

 

 

Hazelnut Vanilla

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Back in August I was telling you about the Coffee Cup Contest for artisans at the Toronto One of a Kind Christmas Show.

I still haven’t finalized any plans, but I’ve started putting together some possibilities.

Starting with – my Hazelnut Vanilla Coffee Yarn.

I dyed two large skeins (500 yds each) of my 75% wool 25% nylon fingering weight yarn.

I made two pots of coffee, using freshly ground Hazelnut Vanilla flavoured coffee beans. I used 12 heaping tablespoons of coffee for each pot. I put the hot coffee into my dye pot, added ‘some’ water, a tablespoon of citric acid (for mordant) and a tablespoon of glauber salt to level the colouration.

I brought the pot to a bare boil and let it simmer for about an hour and a half.

My ‘dye’ didn’t exhaust but I got a good catch on the yarn. My rinse water showed some colour in it but the yarn didn’t appear to fade. I may rinse it an extra time before knitting with it just to be sure the colour is actually fixed.

What’s especially cool about this yarn is that is SMELLS like a great cup of coffee (which is why I used citric acid as my mordant, and not vinegar!).

Click to Smell

My current thinking is to make a pair of Thigh Highs. But I’ll need something else. According to the competition rules there must be a coffee cup in the work, so just smelling like coffee isn’t enough.

I guess I could hunt up some fair isle or intarsia pattern ideas for adding a coffee cup motif.

I scrounged up these yarns that I could use with the Hazelnut Vanilla:

On the left of the Coffee skein – Pure Milk Fiber from Viking of Norway, in pale blue (#920), buttery yellow (#940), and mixed blue and yellow (#969).  100% Milk,  165m/50g. Cool water wash. No dryer.

On the right of the Coffee skein: Araucania‘s Ruca yarn -  in Solid #103 (mauve) and  Multi  #13. 100% Sugar Cane. Hand dyed in Chile. 241m/100g.  Handwash in cool water. No dryer. Dry cleaning recommended.

I dunno – maybe with the mauve is too many colours.

Maybe this is a little more coherent? BTW, the blue milk fiber is almost dead on the same blue as in the Sugar multi.

The Milk and Sugar fibers are both very unstretchy – like a pure cotton, but great feel and look – with a sheen like a good silk. The yarn also is a little heavier (I didn’t do the math, but just going on looks) than my sock yarn. Upshot – I don’t think I can do a fair isle or intarsia with these yarns on my sock knitter – I think whatever I do I will have to duplicate stitch on the socks after the fact.

So now I’m on the hunt for simple motif patterns of some kind of coffee cup(s) or mug(s) that I could work on. And maybe some other simple decorative stitching to add.

Thoughts welcome…

Eco Done

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OK. I’m done like dinner with the Eco Socks. For now anyway. My Lorna’s bits are down to a pathetic zip lock bag, which I will now use as the ‘starter’  for the next generation of Lorna’s bits.

I finished with XXL socks. I didn’t have even close to enough different colourways for these puppies, so I used the same colourways on both socks. Even so I had to to cobble together bits and sub-bits, using as many as 4 bits to get a 10 rows stripe. (Many, many ends!)

Eco Socks XXL


I knit the XXL pairs with the 84 cylinder on the Legare 400.  You can see that many of the Lorna’s colourways pool  with an 84 stitch sock. It’s cool working in stripes but I can tell I wouldn’t care for quite a few of these knit as a single colour 84 sock.

Here’s another look at some samples of each of my sizes….

Eco Socks XL

Eco Socks Large

 

Eco Socks Medium

Eco Socks Small

The XL, Large and Medium were knit with the 72 cylinder on the Verdun 47, and the Small were knit with the 54 cylinder on the Legare 400.

I find it amazing that every pair of socks looks different, even though I was working with the same selection of scraps.

The only downside to Eco Socks – they do take quite a lot longer to knit. Its a LOT of colour changes. And at near the end of the project, working with all these tiny wee balls the bounce all over the place and try to muck up the works! I don’t want to tell you how many times I bent over the grab a wee ball that bounced on the floor, and banged my head on the table. (Stupid tri-focals!).

But the upside – putting a mountain of scraps to good use instead of sending them to the landfill, or eating up precious storage space.

Koigu P882

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OK, here are some of the socks I’ve made using Koigu KPPPM P882 ‘and friends’. (Recall from my earlier post, the ‘friends are P816, P603, P521, P819, P451 and P809, and the dominant colours of each of those is combined into the new P882).

In the first pair, I’ve used P882 as the main colourway, and then I’ve used the ‘friends’ – the 6 colours of the rainbow as the accents.  This is actually the opposite of my intended use, but I wanted to see what the P882 looked like as a main colour rather than an accent.

See how the reds and greens in the striping grab your eye. A close look will show the clear presence of the other colours is more or less equal measure, but they visually play a supportive role in giving the reds and greens depth.

This pair, and all my test pairs, are size Large, knit with the 72 cylinder on the Verdun 47.

In the second pair, I used the P882 for the hem top and the heels and toes. See, especially in the heels and toes, how the individual colours of the rainbow form mini-stripes. This is the effect I was hoping for. Hurrah! I used a pale blue Wooly Nylon to reinforce the heels and toes. I would have used an ecru colour but I’m out of it. The blue did mute the colours of P882 a wee bit, but not a lot.

I used the 6 rainbow colourways in equal measure, both in the leg and in the foot.

And the third version:

This is a variation of the second pair.

In her book, Spinning with Color, Deb Menz, talking about colour balance says,  “…The color theorist Goethe assigned a number to each hue family to determine what proportion of colors would give a balanced result.  The numbers he assigned to each color are:

Yellow 3
Orange 4
Red 6
Violet 9
Blue 8
Green 6″

I’ve used those ratios with felting and other colour work, and decided to see what difference, if any, it would make applied to my Rainbow Socks.  So in the third pair, I calculated the thickness of the individual colour stripes using Goethe’s ratios.

To me, the most obvious difference is the cutting back of the yellow and orange. I do get the feel that the colours flow into each other more, almost as a gradient, while in pair number 2 I find the stripes more abrupt.

I’m pleased with how these colours are working together. From the three pairs above I will select one to use as my Rainbow Socks pattern for 2011.

Koigu KPPPM P436

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This is Koigu KPPPM in colourway P436

For something a little different, in my recent binge of Koigu knitting, here is a pair of Birkensox:

This pair is size Large, knit with the 72 needle cylinder on the Verdun 47.

I’ve knit a short 1 x 1 ribbed top and very short stockinette leg/pre-heel leading into an Eye of the Partridge heel.

Normally I use Wooly Nylon with the heel on a pure wool sock, but I decided (!) the extra dense knitting of the Eye of the Partridge would add sufficient reinforcement.

The foot and toe are ‘regular, so I did add the Wooly Nylon to the toe.

Tips on knitting this style of heel can be found in an earlier post here.

Gothic Knee Socks

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I found this pair of toe-up knee socks, Gothic Temptress, designed by Janine Le Cras – while trolling around on Ravelry.

I don’t have the pattern, but adapted my own version inspired by the photo.

I began with a pico edge mock rib hem top, and then knit a straight forward knee sock, with the exception of making a series of eyelets down the back of the sock for the ribbon.

For each eyelet I  moved a single stitch onto its neighbouring needle, as you would do making a pico edge. That skips the stitch on the first pass, but knits it on the subsequent pass, leaving the hole – or eyelet.

I like to keep things simple, so I used the two yellow hash marks (on the cylinder for the heel) as my reference points for the eyelets, and I made them every 10 rows from about an inch under the hem top down to the pre-heel.

This pair is size Medium, knit with the 72 needle cylinder on the Verdun 47.  At the pre-heel I switched from stockinette to 3:1 mock ribbing for the top of the foot, until the last 5 rows, when I repaced those needles (to facilitate easier Kitchener stitching).

I didn’t have enough ribbon to lace both socks – but here’s one. (That’s just shy of 3 meters of ribbon!)

DW couldn’t find her steel spiked red stilettos, so we had to make do without ;o(

Baroque Thigh High Socks

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Time for another ‘special project’: Thigh High stockings in a fine stripe pattern. I call them Baroque Thigh Highs.

For this pair of socks I am using Fortissima Socka from stash:

  • 3 x 50g balls of Black #1002
  • 1 x 100g ball of #2057 mittelgrau meliert
  • 1 x 100 g ball of #2055 grau-meliert (the lighter of the two greys in the photo)

This may seem like a LOT of yarn for one pair of socks.

It is.

My pattern is quite inefficient: my actual use of yarn was 110 grams of black, and 51 grams of each of the two greys for a pair of size Medium +.  I’ll be making several pairs in several sizes, so its no matter, but if I were making only one pair I’d surely fiddle with the pattern to sneak back the greys to 50g!

I knit these M+ thigh highs on two cylinders. I started the tops on the 100 needle cylinder in a 9:1 mock rib at quite a loose tension. After the hem top, with needles replaced, I knit 100 needles in stockinette for three repeats of my colour pattern: 5 rows middle grey, 5 rows lighter grey, 5 rows black. Then I knit some scrap yarn and run the topper off the cylinder and rehang it on the 72 needle cylinder.

To rehang 100 stitches onto 72 needles I put every third and fourth stitch on every third needle, and in addition I hang an extra stitch on the first of three needles at 12 o’clock, 9 o’clock, and 6 o’clock.  That evenly spreads the 100 stitches.

The pattern is based on my earlier Thigh Highs pattern, except I adapted to make 5 row stripes with three colours instead of 15 rows stripes in two colours.

The thin stripes take  a bit longer time, given all the colour changes. And there are serious ends:

How would you accessorize a pair of thigh highs like this?

What a hoot!

Smaller than Small, encore

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I tried another version of socks I’ve been trying to size down beyond small.

On this attempt I am using the same yarn as the earlier version: my own 1 ply 70/30  Wool/Nylon fingering weight, dyed in Reddish Brown. And I am using the 54 needle cylinder and 36 slot ribber dial on the Legare 400.

For this pair I began with a 2 x 1 rib for 25 rows, and then, instead of switching to stockinette went to a 5:1 rib for the leg and top of the foot.

The resulting sock is about 1/4 inch narrower on the leg, and a bit less than that on the foot, as compared to the same yarn/pattern done in stockinette.

I’m not sure if that is ‘enough slimmer’ – will have to have it test driven!

And, since the purpose of the socks if Hiking, I’ll also have to find out if the purl stitches are an irritant.

If I had a 27 slot ribber dial, I would have done a 1:1 topper and 3:1 leg/instep – but I don’t. (Trying to find one.)

And a suggestion from a reader to try using every other slot on the 80 cylinder is worth a try. I don’t have an 80 but I’ve got an 84, so half of that would be 42 stitchs, a good drop down from 54. This would be a reduced size without the purl stitches.