William's Stocking Completed

Last week I began knitting on a vintage pattern Christmas stocking for my grandson William, now 6½ months old. He is a very happy baby as can be seen in the following photo. I had gotten so far as his name in the top band which I showed in my post for  October 31, 2018. The stocking is knit from the top down.

Since then I have completed the entire stocking at the rough rate of a band a day more or less. The straight needle portion consisted of three multi-color bands –  children, Santas, and trees. The children band I did in one day – probably on the order of four hours or so. My penciled notes on the right are the length of yarn I used in units of length of knitting needle, letting them flow freely rather than winding them on bobbins. This was one of the tips I cited in my December 17, 2014 post about knitting a stocking for William's older sister Vivian. 

I still found the Santa band the most difficult; I had to take a break and do it over two days. The lead pencil dots tell me which end of the row I am starting on. The green highlighter helps me track my progress since yellow was already used in the past.

The trees are a cinch. They are the most straight-forward and least problematic. I used the red and the green yarns straight from the main skeins.

I kept my promise to myself and sewed in the loose yarn ends as I completed each band and was glad I did. I remembered to block the band portion while it was flat and before the heel and foot had been started. After blocking however, I forgot to take a picture of it flat before I started the double pointed needle portion where I knit in rounds instead of rows. The next photo shows the flat stocking body as much as I could get.  Imagine that the tree band extends all the way out to the sides instead of being folded under.

After dividing the stitches out onto double pointed needles, I started to knit the white heel.

This is a view of that heel from the other side, showing how the rear seam extends down the back of the stocking only to the foot portions.

In knitting the heel, the instructions were to slip the first stitch of each row. This does give a nice smooth edge. It is on these two white edges that stitches for the gusset are picked up after the heel is turned.

The next photo shows a completed foot. The pickup on the white heel with the green yarn does go smoothly with that slipped stitch edge. Keeping track of the decreases at the green instep needed some kind of help since there are decrease on two consecutive rounds and then one round that is knitted without decreases.

I keep using the same set of annotated instructions from past stockings and so I need to devise ways to know if my markings pertain to progress on the current stocking or earlier ones. On the triplets of decrease rows, I previously wrote them out as I did them. This time I added circles to keep track of my progress. Similarly in the foot instructions I made a separate set of hashmarks in pencil but labeled it William. If another grand child arrives on the scene I guess I will have to adopt squares and hashmarks of another pen color.

Since I had followed my own advice about sewing in loose ends at the completion of each band, sewing the rear seam was not onerous. I had also left long tails of color at each band and so could use each of them to sew the rear seam in a matching color yarn without generating further loose ends. Here is the completed William stocking with both the name side and the year of birth side facing. 

This is the seventh stocking I have knitted. I have repeated links for earlier ones in the following list.  Some links tell of history and tradition, some are tips, and some contain both.

December 31, 2011 Jeremy and Carrie
December 10, 2014 Autumn (born in October 2012 - I was late completing hers)
December 17, 2014 Vivian (April birthday)
December 28, 2015 Isaiah (July birthday - completed before the stroke of midnight Christmas eve)
November 29, 2016 Lillian (May birthday)
October 31, 2018  William (April birthday) - post on beginning his stocking

The original 1945 pattern can be downloaded for free from
http://www.knitting-and.com/knitting/patterns/christmas/1945-stocking.htm.
Linking up now with Main Crush Monday #137.