Knitting a Christmas stocking, episode 1

Ok, I’ve done some knitting before.
Mostly scarves and the occasional gnome.
(I was training to be a Waldorf teacher. Gnomes are important!)

Once I knit a few things,
I actually hopped over to crochet,
and started making hats,
bags,
blankets,
and the occasional finger puppet.

For some reason, I decided I wanted to knit a Christmas stocking.
Can’t be too hard, right?
Just get a pattern and follow it.

So I attempted to do that.
I scoured etsy for a while until I came across this pattern:

I like that it has all the Christmas colors,
no words,
and something secular, like a tree.
There are others with angels and snowmen,
but I felt like I could do a tree.

Next, off to the local store to buy yarn and the right size needles.

Then, I was ready!
Well, first I forgot how to cast on,
so I had to look that up.

And THEN I was ready!

I’m not going to lie, I was TERRIFIED that I would screw something up. There was a pattern to follow, and if this pattern was followed, there would be trees. And plus signs. Hopefully a heel and a toe. But if the pattern was not followed, there was no guarantee. It could be chaos, or worse, a waste of time.

So I diligently followed the pattern.
Until it told me, 11 rows in,
to go back and pick up the first stitches I cast on
and knit those together with the ones on my needles,
creating a hem.

After trying for a while, I realized I couldn’t figure out how to do it, and it was stressing me out. So I just left it and continued on. Who doesn’t love a roll top stocking anyway?

The next tricky part came soon after.
A part of the pattern calls for carrying two different pieces/colors of yarn along at the same time to create a pattern.
I had never done this before, but looked up some videos, and decided to go for it. Otherwise I would not have any plus signs or trees. Slowly but surely I followed the pattern.

For the first few rows I counted off the colors like this:
“red, red, red, white, red, red, red, white…”
which must have been a treat for my boyfriend.
After the first few rows though, I didn’t even need to count aloud anymore, but I still did in my head.

I switched colors and kept going, and soon I had trees!

Then came the thing that terrified me the most:
the heel.

Now, I’ve decreased and increased before,
but I’ve NEVER made something that looked like a heel.
Luckily I have a friend who saved me by explaining the pattern getting me started. I learned to yarn over and was happily going along

until I dropped a stitch.

Or I thought I did.
Something looked wrong, but I didn’t know how many stitches I was supposed to have. The pattern stopped accounting for that during the heel part, and I was too confused to see what row I was in.

So I took it all out.
All the heel, until I could get back to the part that I was sure of.
Which basically was the start of the whole heel.

I was seriously upset for about two days,
then realized, “Hey, I got to that point once, I can do it again,” and slowly but surely took up the heel challenge once more. I actually dropped a stitch and picked it back up by just looking at the stocking and figuring it out (I could never get it from the drawings I saw in books or online) and made it back to the previous point of failure.

Then it was SSSP and SSSK time.
After watching videos at least ten times each on knittinghelp.com, I was doing great.

I finished the heel on an airplane,
and had a small celebration with my boyfriend.

After that it was cake!
More of the two color work,

and the toe, which was made the same way the heel was.

I did have to learn a new stitch,
the Kitchner, to bind everything together,

and then it was done…mostly.

I went back and did duplicate stitching for the two hearts,
And will do stitching of my initials,
but want to get the second stocking done.

Now that I’ve made ONE,
the second should be cake.
The only difference? Reversing the green and white in the green and white sections.
What can I say, the BF likes green 🙂

I’ll let you know how it goes, ok?

KE