Anna's Crafts

Home of my crafting adventures



I’m turning into my grandmother

This is in itself not a bad thing, my grandmother was a lovely woman. It is from her I got my interest for weaving, she had her loom in the kitchen during winter (save for holiday season), and in a shed without heating most summers. I now have her loom in my possession, it is not the best of them and it is in need of some extra care to work fine again, but it is one I treasure highly. It is not a bad loom per se, but it is rather shallow and thus harder to get a good shed in, and it does have some quirks that more modern looms don’t have.

When it comes to the other fiberarts, such as knitting and crocheting, that was something both her and my own mother did frequently, although grandma probably knitter more then crochet, at least I most often saw her knitting socks of some variety.

And here comes what makes me think I’m turning into her. For one I find that I am occupying myself with knitting socks lately, but it also the fact that I rarely sit and watch TV without some kind of craft in my hands, be it crochet, Tunisian crochet or more recently knitting.

A pair of socks, one on top of the other. The bottom one has the toes pointing right, the top one have them pointing left.
Toe and heel section is in the color curry, midsection and cuffs are dark gray. They are ankle socks.
A pair of knitted socks that ended up too small

I found a lovely tutorial for how to knit the perfect sock, toe-up, made to measure of your own foot at Nimble Needles. I’m knitting on circular needles using a method called magic loop (YouTube video tutorial).

Though I’ll admit the first sock ended up way too big despite this way to measure out how many stitches I needed. Admittedly I skipped on properly blocking and pinning my sample which means it was not measured correctly.

After som recalculation I went at it again with a new sock, but still ended up with slightly big socks. Now I did some lazy re-sizing by simply going down in needle size after noticing the stitch definition was nicer with the smaller needle, but then it ended up too small.

WIP. Socks toe-up, hopefully with a good fit.

Now I’m on my third pair and hopefully the fit will be perfect, it is promising at least. I’m still doing lazy re-sizing, and simply went for the half mm needle size in between the too big pair and the too small pair.

Currently the perfect fit isn’t really the main goal, as someone said, they’ll fit someone. The main goal is to learn how to knit the various elements that a sock consists of; the toe-box and turning the heal and knitting the heal flap and gusset part. Each attempt has given me a slightly better finish.

Once I’m done with this pair, I have a fourth pair lined up, still not super fancy sock yarn, but that one is a wool blend, these are all made in the same 100% acrylic yarn. I expect the wool blend to keep shape a bit better, and perhaps be more comfortable to wear as well.


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