The Last of This Year's Stockings

Hooray! I've finally finished the last of the pre-Christmas knitting projects. These two stockings were a bit of a challenge but I'm very happy with how well they turned out. The customer provided me with a stocking that she wanted me to duplicate along with a "pattern" that consisted of about seven handwritten pages of "k 10 red, 3 green, 10 red, 3 green", etc. etc. Fortunately about the same time that I started deconstructing this pattern one of my librarian friends who knows that I knit a lot picked out a book titled "Mason-Dixon Knitting Outside the Lines" and sent it home along with my requested titles. This book, among other goodies, contained a link to an online pattern for a knitted Christmas stocking that was popular in 1945. While the stocking was not the same as the one I had to duplicate, two of the graphs used in that stocking were identical to the stockings I needed to make. This saved me a lot of time and effort. Here are both sides of the stockings after I finished them this afternoon:



I called my customer to let her know that they were ready to be picked up, and she informed me that she has two more grandchildren coming in the new year, so she'll be asking me to knit a couple more for next Christmas. Thank goodness I've made really meticulous notes and graphs for the entire pattern. It will make the next pair of stockings go much more quickly.

Two Christmas Stockings

I finally finished my first of two big Christmas stocking projects for this year. This was a special order for two Christmas stockings for a friend. She had stockings for herself, her husband, and her two kids that had been machine-knitted several years ago, but the person who made them for her is no longer doing that. This year she gained a daughter-in-law and a son-in-law and wanted stockings made for them to coordinate with their existing stockings. She brought me the stockings earlier this fall and I've been working on them off and on since then. I completed them early this week and she picked them up today. I have to say that I'm very proud of how well they turned out, and she loved them too. I commented that I should have printed up a fancy "certificate of authenticity" verifying that these stockings are indeed designer originals as they weren't made from any particular pattern and are completely one-of-a-kind. In order to match the stockings she already had, these were knitted with dk weight yarn and size 2 needles at 7.5 stitches per inch. Needless to say they each took a few days to complete.

I am developing a photo catalog of all the fine gauge stockings I've made and the graphs for each one. Eventually I'll be able to have customers pick out various elements from the catalog to design their own. Meanwhile I'm about a third of the way through the second stocking of my second big stocking project of the year. By the time I finish this one (hopefully tomorrow) I think I'll be about stockinged out for a while.

Knitting Class

Last month after I spent some time helping a friend with her knitting on a couple of afternoons (she had knitted previously but needed some help with a new project) she finally was able to convince me that I should offer some knitting classes. I printed a flyer describing two classes that I would offer; Knitting 101 would be a basic beginner class and Open Knit would be a class for people who had some experience with knitting but needed extra help with a specific pattern or project.

I emailed friends and plastered flyers around town, and ended up with -- ONE student! So she and I went through three weeks of Knitting 101 and simply had a blast. I had stated that the beginning class would cover casting on, knitting, purling, and binding off, but at the end of the third session my student was also increasing (knit in front and back), decreasing (knit 2 together), and yarning over. She said that she really enjoyed the class (as did I) and we are already making plans for another series of classes in January. I'm hoping that I'll be able to have more than one student per class for the next round.

We're also planning a "class field trip" to Enticements for the end of January (and maybe a few other stores in the area). She didn't realize that there was a yarn store in Decatur, even though her parents live there, but I read about Enticements in another friend's blog here. I'm hoping that my other friend who got me started teaching will also be able to go on the trip.

Two More Etsy Sales

Hooray! Two more Etsy items sold today - a couple of Christmas stockings to a lady in California.

I was able to relist the fisherman stocking immediately because I had another one already made up.

The sock monkey stocking was the only one of its kind that I had on hand, so I won't be making any more of those this year.
Tomorrow I'll photograph and list my full-size afghans and some of my baby/children's hats. I'll have to photograph the fruit hats as well, and I'm sure there are a lot more things that I can't think of right now.

If I could just have a couple more sales days like this it would really help the budgetary crisis immensely. Now if I could just get caught up with my special order stuff we'd be good to go. For some reason I always have many more knitting projects than I have time to do them all. To quote the image from one of my favorite tote bags, "So much yarn, so little time..."