Monday, 29 February 2016

Of Aladdin and Innovations.

My friend, frazzledknitter and I were talking about heels this last week.  She loves checking out second hand booklets for interesting knitting books.  She sent me a note the other day, wondering if I had seen this heel before.

Aladdin Heel  (Go all the way to the bottom of the page.)

I had a really strong sense of deja vu.  The picture was so familiar and yet, where would I have seen it before?  I do have a few booklets from my mother in law, but I usually go for old books.  I have some very interesting vintage knitting pattern books but none from this continent.  My favourite is an vintage English pattern book, that my daughter in law found in a market in Kiev. But booklets, not many and I am certain that my mother in law had baby booklets, sweater booklets, and a mitten booklet but so far as I know she never knit socks.  She certainly never spoke of knitting socks.  I wonder if frazzledknitter loaned it to me to look at, and I kept it!  Eeep.

Today while going through my piles of magasines, I came across it.  Yes I do have a booklet where this is in.

 Interesting the things you find when digging in boxes that you don't get into much.  Maybe this means I still have too much stuff.  Not yarn though.  I never really forget the yarn.


As you can see from the instructions at the bottom of the page I linked above and from this detail, the heel is knit and then, the sides are sewn to the gussets.  It's really an interesting construction and I am going to have to try some of these alternate constructions a go soon.

There is another interesting sock construction in here called the Innovation construction.


It's whole sole is constructed separately and then sewn to the sock.  There are a whole bunch of patterns using this construction.


This one gets really close to the construction I learnt of in Anna Zilbourg's Knitting Free Sole Socks video that Interweave put out a few years ago.  There is no sewing in Anna's construction technique, but the sole is very reminiscent of  this one.  I have that video class and though I have watched it all and knit a sample sock, I haven't used the construction in my own sock knitting.  

So there you go. Three kinds of sock constructions to play with.

  

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