Welcome to my Socktober!
There are so many ways that you can personalize your Socktober. I don’t know many people who can either knit fast enough or find the time to knit an entire pair of socks by hand each day of the month for 31 days in a row. If that’s you, I bow to your superpowers! I thought I would embrace Socktober this year and use it to motivate me to learn new techniques on my sock knitting machine.
I was thinking about how I could make my Socktober manageable.
After all, I still have a business to run and we’re leaping headlong into the busy season for both sewing and yarn sales. Using a sock knitting machine means that it is definitely within the realm of possibility to knit a pair of socks each day. But I want to be realistic so that I don’t end up burning myself out on something that I want to be fun and skill-building. I hope to average one pair per day, but I reserve the right to consider it seven per week rather than one per day. I’ll include photos of all the socks I have done each week and talk about the new skills I worked on mastering. The blogs themselves may end up being a bit shorter than usual. (I typically try to write 1K words.) I’ll just see how it goes.
So leading up to the first week of October, I was watching some CSM videos. One of the knitters uses a ravel cord. I knew about ravel cords but had never used one. When you use a sock knitting machine, you use waste yarn to start out the project. It also acts as a divider between items. This is especially great on a sock machine because it means you don’t have to do a full set up for every sock. You just keep starting new ones after making a dividing strip of waste yarn. So a ravel cord is typically something that has a stiffer texture. You only knit it into one row or round of stitches and you don’t overlap any of them. In other words you don’t knit any of the needles more than once with it. So the idea is that you knit your waste yarn, the ravel cord and then start your actual project yarn. When you are finished, you simply find the middle point of the ravel cord, draw one of the loops of it out of its stitch and gently pull it out of the knitting. Presto, the project is separated from the waste yarn! WOW!
That was the first new thing I tried.
I only tried it on the very beginning of the socks because I was a little scared to do it on the toes. I used a fairly stiff crochet cotton. I think it was South Maid #10. It feels almost like it’s starched. I put it through the yarn guide assemble and pulled enough off the ball so it wouldn’t bind once I started cranking the machine. I very carefully started it on the needle just past my six o’clock needle mark. I knitted that around to the needle in the six o’clock position and then trimmed it off with about 4 inches to spare. I plan to reuse these ravel cords.
It actually went really well!
It worked exactly as it should. It also had the added benefit that it was super easy to see where the loops of the first round sat. The texture of it is very different than the sock yarn which also helped with that. So when I put the first round stitches over the needles for the hung hem, it was easier to see them.
Well, I had been planning to try making a pair of socks with contrasting heel and toe for some time. I already had the yarn wound onto cones and ready to go. Since it was sitting there, ready to go, I figured I would go ahead and try that on my October 1st socks as well. (Mostly because I was too lazy to wind another cone with different yarn.)
I must say that I really hate weaving in ends. So I very clumsily fought with those ends to try and get them knitted into the heels and toes as I went along. It went okay, but the key word here was definitely “clumsy” (although lumpy might also apply… LOL). I want to try that again, maybe a few times, to see if I can’t come up with a method that will be easier and give a really smooth result without having to hand weave the ends in.
I suppose having only one pair to show for my blog this week is a little underwhelming, but it will have to do. Now to decide what I want to try for the next ones.
If you decide to do some sort of Socktober, I’d love to hear what that looks like for you.
JUDY’S DESIGNS 