Spirit of Christmas Vintage Stockings

As an avid crocheter, I’ve always wanted to break into knitting, but never have. There's always been an excuse; I’m too busy, its too hard, etc. One of the most important Christmas traditions my family has is that everyone has a knitted stocking from my Great Aunt Nancy. Over the summer of 2022 she was taken by cancer, so I stepped up to fill the hole left behind.

Early Optimism

My first stocking was to be one for my grandmother who, due to age and health complications, moved in with my parents. I figured that once I found the pattern I needed and learned the stitches, it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to make. After all, I’d done color work in crochet, same concept!

I found a pattern that had key features of our beloved stockings and started making a digital mock up of what the color work would look like. Then I began to practice. I was stupidly excited when I had switching colors down.

Getting Down to It

I jumped into it and it was going better than I could have ever expected! Hour by hour, stitch by stitch, I got more and more of a stocking down. I was even knitting at work, good thing my bosses didn’t mind!

Challenges Present Themselves

Two of the harder things I encountered was 1) how to carry different colors along and 2) what my stitch tension was supposed to be. I noticed partway through that I was having some issues with my stocking being really big because my stitches were too big. Added onto that, the stitches where I had done color changes weren’t lying flat.

Youtube came to my rescue. I learned how to twist my colors as I did a change to avoid sectioning anything out. Tension was just a me problem. It was too late to tighten things without warping the project, so I had to compensate by adjusting how many rows I implimented.

Back to Progress! Or so I thought...

Onward I pressed! I got the main part done and moved onto the foot. Without so many color changes, I was able to get it done in one day. I was so excited! I laid it down next to my Aunt Nancy’s stockings and… Yikes! Look at how big that foot is!

I was so upset! Turns out I'd been using the wrong pattern the whole time! So after a few deep breaths, a lot of unwraveling, and some more googling, you can imagine how excited I was to find this.

The Final Stretch

After examining the particulars of each pattern, I decided that I could still use the main body of what I’d done (thank goodness!), and just needed to use the new foot. While it still was far from perfect, I think the results turned out well!

Not Quite The End?

I wasn’t done yet! My newest brother in law also needed a sock. This one went much smoother! This stocking was heavily based off of his childhood christmas stocking. He was very reluctant to give it up, but we still wanted him to have a stocking that represented him being a part of our family too. I did my best and I think it went well. Enjoy the progession!