playing around with some more radial-symmetry socks and man i'm so happy with how these turned out :D might do some more tweaking but i think i've got the basic structure ironed out!
(also i'm working on writing up a proper pattern for these and would love to get some feedback/concrit, so if you'd like to give these a test knit, lmk and i'll send you a draft of the pattern!)
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i don't generally bother posting the stuff i knit exactly from existing patterns but i finally wove in the ends on a couple frankensteined socks and figured i might as well throw them up here? they're very dumb but i'm fond of them.
for the first pair i made up a colorwork pattern for the feanorian heraldic symbol, and slapped it together with the pisqu sock structure and toe pattern, and a snippet of a mitten for the sole halves. the yarn is 100g of jamieson's of shetland that i got on the high street of fort william, as a treat after walking 100 miles from glasgow to get there, and i had... maybe 10 yards total left over? i had to cut off the long tail from my cast-on and use it to graft the toe closed on the last sock; it was nerve-wracking. if i did this pattern again, i'd probably put the toe motif in between the two heraldic lozenges, but the first time through i wasn't sure how the math would work out so i frontloaded them. ah well!
the second pair is the structure of an existing sock i've forgotten the name of (worked in the round from the tip of the heel to a hat-like shape with six sides; two opposite ones are grafted together to form the instep and the other sets of two open into the cuff and close into the toe), with the colorwork pattern from the gogink sweater yoke. i thiiiink you could do this with basically any colorwork sweater yoke, but i've only tried it with this one. if i did it again i'd add some short rows to the front side of the cuff; the construction sort of pulls it down so that the heel side of the cuff is higher than the front, and a couple short row rounds would probably level it back out. i like these because they neatly smash the cuff-down/toe-up binary and make everybody mad, and i am at all times an imp of the perverse.
oh hey one more really stupid sock construction before i go: tablet woven heel band! this pair is a christmas gift for a good friend so i'm not modeling them myself, but the water bottle works ok. (i am not immune to a non-knitter who appreciates and actually wears hand-knit items, and my friend, god love him, lacks the good sense to tell me to quit giving him weird stuff, so here we are.)
i can't find the post now, but i remember seeing someone on here tablet-weave a color transition for... a sweater? a shawl? i don't even remember anymore. anyway, the idea was still knocking around in my head when i found the squircle sock pattern, which starts with a cuff in the round, adds a very long and narrow heel flap (only 6 stitches wide!), and picks up stitches on either side of it to work in the round again. this monstrosity replaces the original garter stitch heel flap with a short tablet-woven band grafted onto the back of the cuff. to "pick up stitches" along the side, i wove each section with some slack in the weft, using a couple dpns to keep things even (looking back, i don't think i actually used the weft loops themselves as the "slipped stitches," because you can already see the warp twists kind of coming undone along the sides of the dpn-less section in the bottom photo? i think i ran another bit of scrap thread through those loops, tightened the slack out of the weft, used the scrap thread as the slipped stitches, and then tightened those loops out too once i'd gotten a couple rounds into the rest of the sock to get the knitted stitches flush with edges of the woven band.)
things i would do differently if i made these again: tablet weaving is a twined weaving style, so it's a bit thick, and it gets even thicker when you have to weave in the ends. this pattern uses 18 tablets with 4 threads each, for a total of 18 x 4 x 2 x 2 = 288 total ends that need weaving in, which as you can imagine is Deeply And Profoundly Unfun. i might do a missing-hole tablet woven pattern (which the "dublin dragons" motif is supposed to be anyway, but i wanted three colors to match the flag stripes), or i might do a baltic pickup band instead, which should reduce the bulk a bit.
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ended up taking 2 months to finish but they're finally done! the roving is divine dyeworks oceana, 6oz of merino chain-plied to about 550 yards of light sport/heavy fingering. the streaks of green and purple ended up much less pronounced in the final yarn but honestly i'm fine with it; i like the more subtle heathered look.
everyone clap and cheer for my beautiful daughter who has every disease 🥰 her name is þerindë because her wheel is made out of an embroidery hoop; she is entirely handmade and boy howdy does it show
a whole bunch of things have stopped working since i took that video last night and i'm not sure how much more wherewithal i have to keep messing with her, but i did manage to spin about two feet of something before then! so i'm showing her off a bit now, and if i can figure out what-all i fucked up maybe you'll see more of her in the future. some process and progress photos under the cut (not a tutorial. do not do this. i cannot sufficiently stress how bad of an idea this was and is*)
(*if you are going to do this and have questions not answered here i am always happy to answer them, inbox and dms are open etc, but like. i would strongly advise against it)
here's the hoop! it's about a foot across, with a groove carved out with a speedball. this ended up being way too shallow (who'd'a'thunk) so the final version is a lot deeper than what you're seeing here. the paint stirrers are held in with straight pins because i was worried regular nails would just crack the hoop lmao. my girl is so deeply and profoundly scuffed <3
the flyer is made from three cedar shingles glued together because i didn't have a solid piece of wood large enough. astonishingly nothing broke while i was sawing out the rough shape and it whittled down pretty nicely! the hooks are scrap 2mm copper wire, the orfice is a couple inches of plastic drinking straw, and the pulley wheel is also hand-carved, which is why it looks like a fucked-up oreo and has the weird hitch at the top of the spin that you probably saw in the video 🙃 frankly i am astonished it works as well as it does
the wheel frame is. man. the axle supports haven't broken yet but frankly it's a miracle they're still in place with how much strain they're under every time. the original base was that weird little bit of paint stirrer, which (shocker) did not work out in the long run; it's been replaced by an offcut from the frame and is significantly more sturdy now. it's surprisingly level, though, and turns pretty smoothly all things considered!
the frame was a nightmare start to finish; i've never done any serious woodworking before in my life and the whole thing was just kind of slapped together without a plan or any sort of concrete measurement. it wobbles so fucking bad and every few hours i have to push a couple of the parts back together where the nails are sort of drifting out of the wood. you may observe a weird post sticking out the left side of the mother-of-all; that is supposed to be for scotch tensioning. does it actually do that? sort of! the belt is a length of cotton crochet thread that is, after much fiddling, just the right size to not slip out more than once every three minutes.
treadling was another pain to figure out and i think i probably made it way more complicated than it needed to be. it still doesn't work very well and i can't tell if that's something i can fix hardware-wise or if i just have to suck it up and practice a lot more. turns out feet are not as coordinated as hands! i would say "now i know for next time!" but frankly i am never doing this again. you couldn't pay me. speaking of which, i did the math and at my current pre-tax hourly salary i could've bought two brand-new ashford travelers with the number of hours i spent building my awful rickety daughter. at the end of the day, do i love her? immensely. is she "good"? by no stretch of the imagination.
anyway. this was a terrible use of my time <3 but i do finally feel confident enough in all the parts of a spinning wheel and what they're for that i can brave the dangers of facebook marketplace's "spinning wheel" category without getting too badly scammed! which is pretty valuable in its own right, i guess.
seemingly cool fiber arts person i followed a little bit ago just put radfem shit on the dash, anyway the blanket statement that the only contributions of men to textile production are capitalist/exploitative and the only contributions of women are household-centric/victimized is patently untrue. while less of a documented presence, women in medieval europe [1] absolutely participated in weaver's guilds and commercial cloth production [2], and men have been participating in household knitting in all parts of europe for as long as knitting has been a thing there [3]. like i'm not trying to say women haven't been deeply excluded from economic opportunities in the textile trade for centuries but you cannot be making sweeping statements like that about everyone in every part of the world through all of history and expect them to be true. do, like, a basic level of research and have a basic understanding of nuance, i beg of you [4]
footnotes/sources/etc under the cut, sources are a bit basic because i just grabbed whatever was nearest to hand but they should suffice to prove my point:
[1] i'm only referring to western europe here because that's the only region i feel comfortable talking about in any detail without embarrassing myself. systems of medieval cloth production in european guilds are not gonna look anything like the systems of hundreds of servants employed to do textile production for a household in china. don't make categorical statements about everyone everywhere all at once, you will end up with egg on your face.
[2] quotes from "when did weaving become a male profession," ingvild øye, danish journal of archaeology, p.45 in particular.
england: "in norwich, a certain elizabeth baret was enrolled as freeman of the city in 1445/6 because she was a worsted weaver, and in 1511, a riot occurred when the weavers here complained that women were taking over their work" + "another ordinance from bristol [in 1461] forbade master weavers to engage wives, daughters, and maids who wove on their own looms as weavers but made an exception for wives already active before this act"
germany: "in bremen, several professional male weavers are recorded in the early fourteenth century, but evidently alongside female weavers, who are documented even later, in 1440" -> the whole "even later" thing is because the original article is disputing the idea that men as weavers/clothiers in medieval europe entirely replaced women over time. also: "in 1432-36, a female weaver, mette weuersk, is referred to as a member of the gertrud's guild in flensburg, presently germany"
scandanavia: "the guild of weavers that was established in copenhagen in 1500 also accepted female weavers as independent members and the rules were recorded in the guild's statutes"
[3] quotes from folk socks: the history and techniques of handknitted footwear by nancy bush, interweave press, 2011, don't roast me it was literally within arm's reach and i didn't feel like looking up more stuff
uk/yorkshire dales: "...handknitting had been a daily employment for three centuries [leading up to 1900]. practiced by women, children, and men, the craft added much to the economy of the dales people." (p.21)
uk/wales: re the knitting night (noson weu/noswaith weu) as a social custom practiced in the 18th/19th c.: "all the ladies would work on their knitting; some of the men would knit garters" (p.22)
uk/channel islands: "by the early seventeenth century, so many of the islands' men, women, and children had taken up the trade of knitting that laws were necessary to keep them from knitting during harvest" (p.24) -> this one is deeply funny to me, in addition to proving my point
uk/aberdeen: "the knitters, known as shankers, were usually women, but sometimes included old men and boys" (p.26)
denmark: "with iron and brass needles, they made stockings called stunthoser, stomper, or stockings without feet, as well as stockings with feet. the men knit the legs and the women and girls made the heels" (p.32)
iceland & faroe islands: "people of all ages and both sexes knit at home not only for their own use but for exportation of their goods as well" (p.35)
[4] actually? no. i'm not begging for shit from radfems. fuck all'a'y'all.
