3 posts tagged “socks”
As I discovered the other day, there's an easy answer for the first question: DMC #70 crochet thread. (Go DMC.) The others, not so much. I checked this book out of the library hoping for a little information relevant to Victorian yarns as much as for the sock patterns.
Nancy Bush had to address some of these issues as she was working on this book, which is based on sock patterns that appeared in Weldon's Practical Needleworker (probably the premier British knitting magazine of the day, and available in facsimile from Interweave Press) throughout the last half of the nineteenth century.
The most important discovery she seems to have made pertained to the needle sizing gauge: The needles called for by most of the patterns, in the size range of 14-16, were equivalent to modern US sizes 000 and 0000. And that kind of rendered moot the question of what modern yarns were equivalent to the specified ones - because nobody but the most mavenny of authenticity mavens is going to knit socks (or, imagine, thigh-high stockings!) on size 0000 (1.25 mm!) needles. (I think needles of this size are included in the Boye "sock set" I've seen around - but I definitely fall into the "you must be kidding me" camp on this issue. If authenticity in your Victorian garb is important enough to you that you will willingly knit thigh-high stockings on size 0000 needles, more power to you...) And thus, a lesson to take to heart for anyone trying to knit from a Victorian pattern: the socks Nancy Bush presents here are certainly in the spirit of those published in Weldon's, but adapted to modern materials and knitterly sensibilities. You almost need to figure out what you're going to end up with and then work out how to get there.
(From a technical perspective: several different heels and toes are presented, and a couple of the socks are knit in a fashion we find kind of unusual. Good stuff.)
One big mystery: All three balls were from the same dyelot. One of them was skeined backwards from the others, but I caught that and knit from the outside. But if you look closely, you can see that part of it pooled as very large diamonds, and part of it pooled as very small diamonds. I don't think my gauge changed that much over the course of knitting it...so it is it a bad dye job, or did I just do something wrong?
If I had to do it again, I'd use a solid color, or else knit it in a circle, felt it, and then cut the tube open. I'm not really thrilled with the diamonds. Hubby likes them, though.
And also: My Daughter's Stockings Are Some Monkeys. (Monkey! Monkey! Monkey!)
1) I finished off the knitting needle case from last year - mostly; I lost the smaller piece of felt that was supposed to make decorative flowers, but the case is fine without it.
It came out bigger than I expected - I don't know why I thought it would come out about the same size as my crochet hook case, given that knitting needles are twice as long as crochet hooks. Silly me. But it's nice and case-y and I managed to stitch the pockets without the seam showing on the outside, so it's good.
2) I got one piece of cross-stitch framed. My "stitching buddies" had an outing to our LNS last month, and it turned out they were having a sale on framing, so I figured I'd get an estimate... The one time I'd gotten professional framing before, I was kind of disappointed with the results; Michael's takes a kind of hard-sell approach, and I ended up with a very nice frame with a piece of needlework in it. This experience was completely different: instead of setting up a stack of triple-mats and expensive molding and assuring me that it wouldn't look as nice unless I got that mat cut 5" wide all around - the clerk asked "So do you want a mat on it?" Yes, I did. I ended up with exactly the mat, glass, and molding I wanted, all in budget...I'll be going back to the LNS for more framing as the budget allows; I've got a couple more that I don't want to do myself. (And, yay, this puts me 1/3 of the way to one of my goals for the year...)
3) I've almost completed Daughter's socks - I'm past the gusset on the second sock, and for some reason socks always seem to go so much faster once I get past the heel - doesn't matter what kind of pattern I'm using, or whether I'm going toe-up or cuff-down. She's tried on the first one, and pronounced it "cool" and "comfy". (Meanwhile the socks I made last year for my niece the Sock Nazi have become her favorites - I think she likes that there aren't any seams and the length is just perfectly right.)
Jericho really likes Panda Cotton. I've gotten to practice my nostepinde skills on the leftovers from the first sock more than once. If I think of it in those terms the yarn-thievin' cat gets to live...
4) I've spun some more. I had quite a bit of fiber left from the class I took last fall - there was one length of a light-brown fiber with other colors in it that was used to demonstrate twist (you could see how the red fiber twisted against the brown, for example), and some light blue Romney (?). I spun the multi-colored one as an experiment, just wanting to see how it came out, and it was pretty - but kind of thick (DKish?) so I'm not going to ply it. For a single it's kind of overspun, but there's got to be something cute I could make with an overspun DKish single. :) I'm working my way through the blue now - I'm spinning it pretty fine, so there's turning out to be a lot of yardage even though I'm sure there's not more than an ounce or two of fiber there.
My biggest problem with spinning? Consistency. I can tell by looking at my spindle that the blue stuff has gotten finer as I've gotten farther along.
I would show you pictures of all the pretties - but the camera is hiding. Boo, camera.
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