By Hand: knitting needles

(modified from Kids’ Knitting, by Melanie Falick -- a book every knitter should have on the shelf)

Materials:

• 2 or more colors polymer clay (Sculpey works great) or anything to use as the end-cap – acorn, wooden bead, button – to ensure your stitches don’t fall off
• 1/4-inch or 3/16-inch dowel cut into two 14-inch lengths
• pencil sharpener
• fine-grit sandpaper
• mineral oil or any type of oil that the wood can soak up
• craft glue

Note: a 1/4 inch dowel will make a size 10 needle and a 3/16 inch dowel will make a size 8 needle. Any size dowel can be used, but smaller ones tend to break and larger ones are hard to use.

STEP 1 -- To make the needle ends:
1. preheat oven to 250 degrees for clay
2. choose a main color of clay and roll into a 1/2 inch ball. Don't make the ball too large or it will weigh down the needle. Repeat for 2nd ball.
3. break off bits of 2nd color and press tiny dots onto larger balls. Roll them around and around until you have a nice smooth ball.
4. press each ball onto 1 end of each dowel piece. I flattened my balls so that the needles wouldn't roll when on their sides -- you can make any shape you want.
5. lay dowels on baking dish (such as a pyrex pan) so ball hangs over; place in oven, making sure balls do not touch oven shelf.
6. bake according to clay directions -- about 30 minutes for Sculpey.
7. cool about 10 minutes. Remove balls from dowels and set aside while you work with dowels.

STEP 2 -- To make needles:
1. using the pencil sharpener, sharpen one end of each dowel until tip is as pointy as a dull pencil. You can make double-pointed needles by sharpening both ends! You don’t want the point too sharp as that will split the yarn as you knit.
2. rub each dowel with sandpaper until very smooth, making sure that each point is dull. All rough spots need to be sanded off, else yarn will stick to needle.
3. with a paper towel or clean rag, rub the dowels with mineral oil until shiny and extra smooth. Replace clay balls, using glue to secure clay to flat end of dowel.

You can use anything for the end of your needle to keep the stitches from falling-off – an acorn cap, bead, rubber band, etc. The important thing is that it doesn’t catch on your yarn but does hold the yarn on the needle.

Happy knitting!

Tutorial -- Quick and Thick Sox

Some of the ladies over at 4real asked about sock knitting. I offerred to do a tutorial about socks and since the thick socks make it so easy to learn to knit, I thought I'd do a tutorial on a quick and thick sock.

I'll post the formal pattern separately, but this tutorial will walk you thru all the steps of knitting a sock. So here goes:

Step 1: Cast on the appropriate number of stitches. You'll be using double-pointed needles, but you can certainly CO all to one needle and then distribute onto the other needles.
Step 2: distribute CO sts onto the dpns -- here I have a set that is 4 needles, so I distribute the 32 stitches evenly across 3 of the needles -- 10 on each of two needles, 12 on the 3rd needle. You'll join the CO together by knitting the first stitch from the needle below the needle from which the yarn is coming.
Step 3: here the cuff is done -- a k2p2 rib makes an elastic but lovely ribbing. Remember the cuff should be at least one inch deep so that the rib is able to pull-in and keep the sock up!
Step 4: here, we've finished knitting the leg and have distributed the stitches onto two needles only. The first half of the stitches will be used to knit back-and-forth to create the heel flap. The second half of the stitches will remain unknit until the heel is done. Step 5: Here the heel flap stitches are done. The right-side row for traditional heel stitch is done by *slip 1 st, knit 1 st; rep from * across the heel flap. Next row (ws): sl 1 st, purl across all the other sts. This "traditional heel stitch" pulls in nicely and allows sock to hug the heel back. As you can see in the picture ... the slipped stitches are larger and make the knitted sts sink back so that the heel actually only looks like half as many stitches. Step 6: The turned heel flap is shown above. Basically you work half way across, k2tog, k1 and then turn, purl back across and p2tog. Continue knitting the right-side stitches and purling the wrong-side stiches, adding 1 more each time until you've worked across all the heel flap sts (here you'll have 10 sts left when you're done turning the flap of 18sts).Step 7: once you've finished turning the heel, you'll pickup the side sts -- which are technically called the gusset sts. Since you've slipped every st at the beginning of each row when doing the heel flap, you'll have half the number of rows knitted as a nice chain on the edges to pickup -- here we'll pickup nine sts (from the 18 rows knitted for heel flap).Here the gusset sts have been picked up and the top of the foot sts (technically, the instep stitches) are all ready to work. You can see the inside of the heel flap -- the slipped-stitches are where the bar of yarn is shown here.Step 8: once you've picked up all the gusset sts -- 9 either side of the turned-heel and knitting across the instep sts -- for a total of 46 sts. Every row you'll dec the extra gusset sts (the slanted line shown above) on either side of the heel flap until you have a total of 28 sts for the foot. You'll re-distribute these 28 sts onto two needles only -- 14 sts each -- as this makes it easiest to shape the toe once you've done the 15 rnds or so for the foot.Step 9: shape the toe (ending the foot about 1 to 1-1/2 inces short of the desired finished length of the foot) by k1, ssk, k across the needle to 3 short of the end, k2tog, k1; rep on second needle. Continuing this toe-shaping until you have 4 sts left on each needle -- 8 sts.

Step 10: once you're down to the 8 sts, cut the yarn (leaving a tail about 4 inches long. Thread onto a big-eyed needle and thread thru the sts as you remove them from the needle. Pull tight and tie off the end ... this makes a nicely finished toe.
And the sock is done! Now, repeat for the second foot ... now that wasn't so hard was it?