This is my favourite technique for casting on the toe of a sock.

Check out knitty for a great written (by the inventor) description, but here’s a quick clip I found on youtube.

Once again, the calibre of videos on youtube are appalling, this is the shaky best that I could find.

I’m seriously considering breaking out the camera and recording a few of my own when I get back from my travels.

Alas, onward to the technique:

Five skeins out of five.

The Wollmeise.

l-r: Tiefer See, Maria’s Deepest Purple, Suzanne, Rittersporn, Rosenrot.

Yum!

Kitchener is an invaluable technique in knitting, in my opinion it’s the only way to make a seemless join between two rows of live stitches.

It’s a fiddly technique to learn, but well worth the effort.

Truth told, the demonstrations on youtube are kind of mediocre, so here’s the best of a bad bunch, feel free to comment with links to better descriptions of the process.

Five skeins out of five.

Autumnal Colours.

It’s my newest obsession, just in time for a southern spring.

l-r: Trekking XXL, Pacapeds, Indie Dyer, Chewy Spaghetti, Fleece Artist, Numma Numma, Paigewood Farm, Austermann Step

I was a spinner years before I was a knitter and one of my favourite spinning wheels to use is my antique Little Peggy wheel by John Rappard.

Rappard is long retired from wheel making, but from what I can gather, he made a few different wheels in his time, including another, later portable upright called the Wee Peggy and a Norwegian style called Mitzy.

This is a Little Peggy, the reciept shows it was bought for $120 in 1976. It’s a copy of a very old Shetland wheel, and was sold assembled and polished.

It’s an upright and very easily transportable, with the onboard lazy kate there at the front. This one fits strapped into the front seat of my old Lancer, making it a great wheel to take to spin ins and guild meetings.

It can be used with a Scotch or Double Drive tension.

This is my all-time favourite cast on.

It’s quick, easy to execute and remember and it’s stretchy. Once you have a feel for how much yarn your tail needs, you won’t know how you lived without it.

It’s the cast on I almost always use for my own designs, because I love that you’re creating the first row while you cast on, it’s economy of knitting and I’m nothing if not lazy.

This video, taken from youtube, was made by the very generous people behind Knitting Help, a wonderful knitting resource, and it’s the one I learned the technique from.

Five skeins out of five.

The Yarn Yard.
Another wonderful Scottish dyer, this time based outside of Edinburgh, The Yarn Yard dyes all manner of beautiful yarns and fibres and also stocks nifty gifts and tools.

At this point, I feel I have to admit to already making a purchase of some yarn and fibre, which is winging it’s way to me as I type, but if I had an unlimited fibre budget, I’d be adding to my cart the 008 sock yarn, probably in Beautiful (100% BFL) or Caber (75% wool, 25% bamboo). I’m not really an understated, grey tones kind of girl, but something about this one really calls to me:

And some more gorgeous merino/tencel fibre in this yummy pink and black. Truth told, I can’t be 100% that I didn’t already buy this one, it’s right up my alley:

I’m a soap maker, and sometimes things just don’t go according to plan. Take these beer soaps, for example. They’re beautiful to use (if I do say so myself), Beer Castile, 100% olive oil made with Tooheys Old, but, well, they’re kind of fug.

I poured them at too thick a trace and they’re lumpy and cragy and too small to sell.

How to fix these naked beer soaps? Crank out some soap socks on my little vintage toy knitting machine.

It’s kind of impossible to find directions for this thing online, so hopefully this will help anyone googling vintage toy circular knitting machine instructions.

So, what follows is my pattern for soaps in socks. I sell these, so please only use this pattern and tutorial for personal use, charity crafting and gifts. It is not for commercial use.

I love these little soaps, they’re made of a 100% wool single that is really drifty and felts really nicely. I used Sean Sheep Armytage for these, but it’s very much like Brown Sheep Lambs’s Pride Worsted in feeling (not in content, though).

This is my machine, which I believe is from the early 70s. To start a tube, all you do is thread a few inches of yarn through the centre of the machine, then, starting with the coloured needle (which is really kind of a hook, but they’re called needles) wrap the yarn under the first needle and behind the second, continuing until you’re back before the coloured needle.

It’s really important that you do this first step loosely, because otherwise, the machine will get stuck and make a terrible grinding noise.

Now, with the yarn threaded under the hook of each needle, crank 20 rounds of the machine. The handle turns more than once for each revolution of the barrel, so count the number of times the coloured needle passes.

Once you have gone around 20 times, stop and cut the yarn tail to about six inches (more or less, depending on your preference and your adeptness with a darning needle).

Thread your darning needle with the yarn tail and use it to catch each loop as it comes off each needle, as you crank slowly around. Once they are all on the darning needle, slip them onto the yarn tail and tighten the loop as far as you can, then secure it. Because these are being felted and will lose some of the stitch definition, I thread the yarn through the knitting and tie a knot, weave the end for an inch or so and then clip.

Place your soap into the soap sock and tighten the beginning tail of the yarn to snug, and secure as for the other end. Lovely Zephyrama suggested that you crochet the yarn end into a chain to make a soap rope. Nice!

Your soap is now ready to use. Because you’ve used a feltable wool, the sock will tighten with use and create a nice, scrubby surface.

Enjoy!

It should possibly be noted that there are modern toy knitting machines on the market, I believe there is a Barbie branded one. I haven’t used one of these, but my research has indicated that they’re pretty crap, the tension is impossible and they break after a few revolutions. I guess they don’t make them like they used to.

If you ever see one of these old machines around, pick it up, there are some fun things to be made, from toys to knit suffolk puffs (yoyos) and scarves.

We’ve a few more patterns in our repertoir that use this machine, we’ll post them as we get projects photographed.

Soaps in Socks by Spiraling is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

A while back, we bought a cheap Ashford Traditional. We have a few wheels and it was never really intended for much spinning, but it was a good price, you know how it goes.

When we got her home, we realised that the Traddy just isn’t for us, not in a house full of beautiful artisan wheels, so we set about turning her into something we could use.

Let me just say straight off that Ashford Traditionals are built to last. We really had to put some muscle (and some heavy tools)  into pulling it apart.

Once we broke the back of the beast, we extended the wheel axle enough to pass the front leg, then constructed and added a simple skein winder, with dowels and holes set at different diameters.

Now, it’s very easy to treddle up a skein that’s super simple to measure, just count the revolutions and multiply by a metre.

My favourite cast off for socks is the sewn cast off, popularised by Elizabeth Zimmerman.

It’s a little bit fiddly and I find it definitely works best with 1×1 ribbing, but it’s a good one to have in your repertoire.

The cast off is stretchy and almost invisible, which is a very good thing.

Four and a half skeins out of five