Mad Sock

This is a mad sock.

It’s knitted from the Happy-Go-Lucky Boot Socks pattern by Veronik Avery from the Sock Knitting Masterclass book. Regular readers of this blog will know that I am slowly knitting my way through this treasure trove of interesting patterns. Some have blown my mind, some have inspired me but this is the first sock I’ve knitted that I think is a bit unhinged.

Don’t get me wrong, a sock this mad deserves respect. I am lost in admiration for this designer’s adventurous spirit and technical proficiency.

Let’s start with the colors, I am terrible with color, I can’t tell what color goes with another color, and when people say “there’s more green than yellow in that blue”, I have no idea what that means. Avery’s original color choices for this sock are much less strident than mine, leading to a much more subtle difference between the two colors in the stripes and diamonds. However, there are still stripes and diamonds in the same sock. And get this, the diamonds are just stripes knitted with a pattern of slipped stitches (as you would normally do in a reinforced heel).

I think my favorite part of this sock is the “baby cable” pattern in the cuff and the heel, cleverly created by making a right or left leaning decrease without losing both stitches.

I’ve only knitted one of these mad marvels so far, but the other is already on my needles and when I have finished it I’m going to see if I can use this cool color technique to make a sock with a band of chevrons around the leg.

Winter Flowers – Free Pattern Hints and Tips

Winter Flowers is a new free Natty Knits pattern, you can find it on the sidebar to the right of this blog.

I chose the name Winter Flowers because these blooms are woolly and robust, they are knitted in sock yarn, which makes them durable too. The flowers are 2.5″ in diameter and have an inner and outer layer which are knitted separately. They are perfect little adornments for bags, hats and other accessories. You can also add a pin to the back of a flower and turn it into a brooch.

Here are some hints and tips to help you get the best from your pattern.

Yarn Suggestions

Any sock yarn will do for these flowers, but it’s better to use a heather or solid color as a striped yarn is going to look a little strange. Then again, strange might be just what you want! I love Knit Picks Stroll sock yarn because of all the great solid color choices and it’s affordable too.

More About Short Row Shaping

The Winter Flowers pattern uses a technique called short row shaping. A short row is made when you turn your knitting before the end of a row. This means that some sections of your work will have more rows than others. The sections with more rows will arch, creating a three-dimensional shape. Each time you turn your knitting before the end of a row you create a loop of yarn under a stitch and a small hole in the fabric. So, when you knit back over a stitch that has a loop under it, you must knit into the loop at the same time as the stitch above it to close the hole. There’s a special blog post about short row shaping, with lots of photos just here.

Short rows in stockinette stitch can be tricky, if you find you have an uneven finish on your flowers, try adjusting the tension of the work before you sew it together.

Thinking Sideways

Winter Flowers are knitted sideways, which means that you won’t see a petal shape until you’ve knitted enough so that your knitting will start to fold back on itself. When it does, it will look like this:

Fake Grafting

To seam the cast on and bind off edges of the back of the body, use fake grafting. Lay one stockinette stitch piece above the other. Notice how each stitch forms a V shape. You make the seam by sewing Vs between the top and bottom pieces.

Sew from back to front through the middle of a V in the bottom piece. Then sew behind both arms of the corresponding V in the top piece and then from front to back into the original V.

Pull the yarn gently until your two stitches form a sewn V that matches the size of the knitted Vs.

Instant Downloads from Etsy

New style listing, now with instant download

I am very pleased to be able to share the excellent news that Etsy now offers digital patterns as instant downloads. This is quite a revolutionary move, it means that when you buy a Natty Knits pattern you no longer need to wait for me to email it to you. It means that I won’t forget to add the download to the email (yes that has happened). It means that the email won’t get lost in cyberspace. It means I can leave the computer for longer than 12 hours!

Can you tell I’m excited?

I have now uploaded the PDFs for all my patterns and changed the titles and photos to reflect that these are instant downloads. The shop looks really good, you should take a look.

I tested out the download process over the weekend, just to make sure it works from a customer perspective. Here’s what I found…

Immediately after you’ve paid for a pattern, there’s a payment completed screen, which now also contains a large blue box with “Files Ready to Download” written on it. Obviously if you press that button, you can download the PDF. But don’t despair if you miss that prompt. 

You will also receive an email from Etsy which will have a big blue button in it saying “View your files on Etsy”, this will also take you to your downloads.

And finally, you can also access your digital patterns whenever you are logged in to Etsy. There is a blue link on the top right of the page that says “Your Account”. Click that and choose “Purchases” from the pull down menu. Then click the big blue button that says “Files Ready to Download”. You can then open and save the pattern.

Your digital downloads are always attached to your Etsy account so you can download them more than once.

If you’d like more information about digital downloads on Etsy, please refer to their help section.

And to celebrate I’ve added a new 3 pattern deal to the Natty Knits shop. The Robot, Snake and Shark patterns are all instantly available and at a discounted rate of $6 for 3 patterns.

I-Cord

I-Cord is a very useful way to knit a thick cord that was invented by Elizabeth Zimmerman. Some say it’s called I-cord because it looks like a letter I, others say it’s because it’s so easy that even an idiot could make it.

I-Cord is knitting in the round on a very small scale, using only three (or sometimes four) stitches. If you’ve ever used a French Knitting bobbin, a spool or a Knitting Nancy the final result is the same, although with I-Cord you’ll just be using two double pointed needles. Here’s how to knit I-Cord.

1. Cast On 3 stitches on 1 double pointed needle.

2. Knit 3 stitches.

3. DO NOT turn the needle around. Instead, slide the stitches to the other end of the needle and knit them all again.

4. Repeat step 3 until your I-Cord is the desired length.

5. Bind off.

I-Cord always looks messy at first, but as you knit more rows you can pull on the cast on tail and this will bring the two sides of the knitting together and make the I-Cord look more neat. If you don’t knit that first row, but slide the stitches to the other end of the needle straight after casting on your I-Cord will have a more rounded end.

I have used I-Cord in my toy designs, for the Snake Maker, the Pumpkin Head and the Spider patterns. I’ve also seen it used to make ties for cardigans or hats and coiled and sewn together to make small round mats or baskets.

It really is that simple and versatile. If you haven’t tried it before just pull out some yarn and a double pointed needle now, it will only take a few minutes.

Dear Ravelry…

image copyright ravelry.com

…you are my hero. One little website with absolutely the best database of patterns and yarns in the world. I bet you’re glad cloud computing was invented because now you can move that data farm out of the spare room. Of course when I say “little” I mean ENORMOUS. I hear you just hit three million registered users. That’s epic. It doesn’t seem so long ago that we were celebrating one million users.

Now, we haven’t always seen eye to eye. Remember that tweet you sent me saying that Ravelry wasn’t “supposed to be difficult”? But let’s face it, your interfaces are much better now, I like that new step-by-step thing when you add a pattern, oh and the photos in threads, that’s better too.

I spent a long time with you earlier, adding all the socks I’ve knitted to my projects folder. And I found myself thinking about exactly how awesome you are Ravelry. So awesome, that I made a list…

One…You bring knitters together. We might be a solitary lot when we’re focused on a tricky lace pattern, but knitters are human too. We like a good gossip or a cause and there you are Ravelry, introducing us all, across the globe. In fact you have introduced me to countless knitters,  testers, a technical editor who changed the way I thought and other designers who have all helped me enormously along the way.

Two…That pattern database is a designer’s dream. Just this morning I looked up a design idea and it wasn’t in the Ravelry database, so that’s my next project. No designer wants to go where everyone else has gone before.

Three…Which brings me to your protections for designers. You make sure that your pattern database is clean, you don’t stand for plagiarism, you shut that right down. If someone does decide to copy my shark pattern and say they made it up, you will be there with your army of sharp-eyed, keen-brained volunteer editors, being the arbiters of community justice, with pointy sticks.

Four…And you have such reasonable rates, maybe it’s because you don’t have a hipster HQ in Brooklyn to support. When I pay my Ravelry invoice, I always marvel at how you keep this thing going for such a tiny price.

Ravelry, I salute you. Keep up the good work.

(For those of you who don’t know, Ravelry.com is a free website for knitter’s and crocheters. It has forums and databases of patterns and yarns, it allows each knitter to keep track of their own patterns, yarns or projects if they wish and link them to a central database. Look, just click on the link, you’ll thank me for it.)

Snake Maker – Hints and Tips

The Snake Maker pattern (previously published in Knit Now magazine) is now available from Ravelry and in the Etsy shop.

The Snake Maker allows the knitter to knit a snake to their own specifications. It includes a tail, head, tongue and left and right coiling sections. These right and left leaning sections can be knitted in different orders to create different kinds of snakes, a coiled snake, a sidewinder snake or even a straight snake, all in the same pattern. Here are some hints and tips to help you get the best results.

A Note on Gauge

When I knit toys I always use needles that are one or two sizes smaller than recommended for the yarn. You don’t have to get the gauge exactly right, but you can check it by holding your garter stitch fabric up to the light. If the gauge is tight enough you should only see pinpricks of light through your knitting.

More About Short Row Shaping

The Snake Maker pattern uses a technique called short row shaping. A short row is made when you turn your knitting before the end of a row. This means that some sections of your work will have more rows than others. The sections with more rows will arch, creating a three-dimensional shape. Each time you turn your knitting before the end of a row you create a loop of yarn under a stitch and a small hole in the fabric. So, when you knit back over a stitch that has a loop under it, you must knit into the loop at the same time as the stitch above it to close the hole. There’s a special blog post about short row shaping, with lots of photos just here.

Short rows in stockinette stitch can be tricky, if you find you have an uneven finish on your Snake, try adjusting the tension of the work before you sew it together.

I-Cord

The tail begins with some I-cord, this is a way to knit 3 stitches in the round on 2 dpns. There are many great tutorials about i-cord on the internet, my favorite two are Knitting Help, for their no-nonsense videos http://www.knittinghelp.com/videos/knitting-tips and PurlBee for her great photography http://www.purlbee.com/i-cord-tutorial/. (Meanwhile I have added i-cord to the list of things I must blog a tutorial for.)

SSSK?

That’s right, as though an SSK were not torture enough, I added another stitch into the mix. Do not be scared of this maneuver!  You only have to do it twice and the snake’s eyes can cover any unsightly stitches when you sew them on later. Remember to slip the first two stitches knitwise and the third one purlwise . If you feel that the stitch is too uneven try purling the resulting stitch through the back loop in the next row.

Stuffing

Stuff your snake as you sew up the seam in the body. This will give you a chance to get the stuffing even without trying to stuff around the coils. There’s a popular blog entry about stuffing just here, which may also help.

Mattress Stitch

The snake’s body is sewn together with mattress stitch. This is an often used seaming technique for the sides of stockinette stitch and another one that Knitting Help explains really well.

If you have any more questions about this pattern, please contact me through the blog, Etsy shop or Ravelry.

M1R or The Right Leaning Increase

Much attention is given to left and right leaning decreases, everyone wants to get their SSKs smaller and less misshapen. But very little is said about the difference between left and right leaning increases. Often, knitting patterns do not distinguish between the two, leaving a cryptic M1 to be interpreted by the knitter in whichever way they please, alternatively, an M1 is described as a left leaning increase, or M1L.

We toy knitters need right leaning increases to balance out the left leaning ones. For example, I used both right and left leaning increases in the tail of my shark pattern to make it fully symmetrical.

Here’s how to make a M1R.

1. Pick up the bar in the knitting between your needles from front to back on the right needle.

2. Slip this loop on to the left needle without changing it’s orientation. To do this, place the left needle tip into the front leg of the loop from back to front.

As you can see, it looks a bit contorted, but this is correct.

3. Knit into the front leg of the loop, like an ordinary knit stitch. This is where is gets difficult, because that loop is tightly twisted. I solve the problem by rolling that new stitch around the needle using my left index finger. This stretches out the stitch, so I can knit into it.

4. Knit the stitch as normal.

The finished stitch looks as though it is growing from the stitch to it’s left. Here’s a close up of those M1Rs in the Shark’s tail.