Frankie’s similar stocking here. Ellie’s similar stocking here. Public (view only) chart files here.

Info on charts & mods:

Charts: mainly as in poppleton’s Pair of Stockings, with some improvised mods to the bells to make them smaller, plus some extra motifs from 150 Scandinavian Motifs and the web. Added a few inc’s and dec’s along the way to make the charts fit.

Mods: I frogged so much of this stocking to get one I was happy with!

• Started with a picot hem. Dunno how many rows per side, but I should have used one less on the inside so it doesn’t roll out as much.

• The toe was super huge, as was the paper doll motif I finished the foot with. So I frogged both, replacing the dolls with a simple, small motif. I redid the toe, removing every other k row to shorten it. I finished by decreasing to 6 or 8 sts and cinching closed. It’s just a stocking, after all!

• I hated the pattern’s heel after making it. It was so huge that it looked disproportionate and floppy. I also wasn’t digging the snowflakes, an improvised motif. It added too much blue, had too much snow, and all together was just visually confusing.

• I picked up the rounds just before the snowflake motif and just before the foot, cutting out the snowflake and heel portion. Not having knit many socks, I read up on different heel constructions and liked the short-row heel that poppleton used, knitting it with these instructions on Knitty.com: The Flapless Heel – The Short-Row Heel. After the heel I grafted the leg + heel portion back together with the foot + toe portion. I rotated the foot + toe portion to put the wedge on the creases.

• Weaving in ends and embellishments is better to do as you go along because it’s nice to see how tightly you’re pulling on ends by checking the front side, which is hard to do as you work on the bottom portions of the stocking. I used this french knot technique for many of the embellishments. With the tiny Vanna’s Glamour yarn, the knots showed up better with 3 wraps.

General comments:

I wanted to use the Cascade 220 we had from an unused palette (or else I would have done it in fingering yarn). In order to get more resolution in a reasonably-sized stocking, I had to use such small needles! Each motif still came out super tall! I used a Knit Picks circular with the magic loop method. I don’t really like how sharp they are, but my Addi interchangeables don’t go that small.

I forgot to watch my floats around the ladders, and some rows are knit quite narrow so there are a few bottlenecks for toys. Blocking helped a bit, but next time I’ll remember to wrap my floats before changing needles and not pull them tight. You can see that I learned this lesson as I went, because the foot is wider than the top of the leg.

Just need to duplicate stitch the name when the baby’s born!

All in all a fun project that taught me a lot.