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Well that’s not scary: Turning heels is actually easy knitting

Back in the day, before I started knitting socks (which is considerably more recently than you’d think; an Instagram reminder popped up the other day to tell me I knitted my first socks two years ago), I was absolutely terrified of turning heels. SO SCARED. It seemed like some impossible black magic that I would never be able to master.

The backs of the Ya Basic bedsocks, showing their heels

Sock knitting was difficult, I was convinced of it. I should not even give it a try. Quit before you have the chance to get behind.

Well, if the title of this blog hasn’t already given it away, then I’ve got something I need to share with all other knitters who are scared of socks. Heel turns aren’t scary. Heel turns aren’t difficult. Heel turns aren’t witchcraft.

Heel turns are actually simple, and also quite fun.

Yes, there are many different types of heel turn. And yes, some of them are more complex than others, and some suit different feet better and some suit different socks better and blah blah blah. But let’s not worry about that. All you need to worry about is the heel turn in the pattern you’re using. Let us designers worry about the best way to swivel that heel round.

So, to show how simple heel turns can be, I’m going to walk you through one.

Take my new Ya Basic bed socks; the heel turn on those is so simple that I’m almost tempted to get my 3yo to try it out to see if he can handle it. To be honest, the only reason I haven’t done that is because I don’t want to get into another ridiculous situation where he insists he has to do something himself and it takes such a very long time and I lose the will to live because I could just do it so much quicker. I have visions of him running across the playroom every time I want to turn a heel, and I am not prepared for that to happen. No.

Anyway. The Ya Basic heel turn is…well, pretty basic. In case you don’t believe me, I’ve actually filmed all the stitches you need to do it, so you can see for yourself how it works. It’s like the knitting equivalent of unmasking the Scooby Doo villain; pull the sheet off, and there’s nothing frightening there are all.

What the hell is a short row heel turn?

First things first; you’ll see in the pattern that Ya Basic uses short rows to turn the heels. This sound like another bit of baffling knitting jiggery pokery, but really it just means this: when you knit a short row, you don’t knit across all the stitches in that row. You knit a few, and then you turn your work round and knit back again. At each end of the row you do a different stitch from the standard so you don’t end up with holes. That’s it.

One thing you’ll see in the Ya Basic instructions is “Sl 1”, which translates as ‘slip one stitch’. That’s one you can take pretty literally; you just put your right hand needle in to the first stitch on your left hand needle, and slip it across without knitting it. Simple. You’ll see that at the start of the rows in the heel turn section.

So how do I ssk (slip, slip, knit?)

Next up, you need to do a ssk before you turn your work. What that translates to is “slip 2 stitches as if to knit, and then knit them together.” Way easier than it sounds. Just watch this:

See what I did there? I slipped those two stitches over to my right hand needle. Then I inserted my left hand needle into the front of them, wrapped the yarn round the back (right hand needle) and slipped them off lefty. Then, for the sake of completing the short row, I did one more standard knit stitch and then turned my work.

Watch it a few times. Slip, slip, knit these two stitches together. Knit one more. Turn.

Right. And how do I p2tog (purl two together)?

If you’ve got the ssk down, the p2tog is going to be a piece of piss. Again, let’s have a look:

This one’s even easier than the ssk. You basically do a normal purl stitch, but rather than putting your right hand needle through just the first stitch, you put it through the first two. Then wrap your yarn and finish your stitch as normal. Again, I’ve done a standard purl stitch after the p2tog just to show exactly how to finish the row according to the pattern.

P2tog done. And with those two stitches you’ve done the bulk of the heel turn.

But how do I pick up stitches?

If, like me, you look at the instruction to pick up stitches and the first thing you think is “but I never put them down in the first place”, then this instruction can seem a bit tricky. But again, it’s not.

When you were knitting the heel flap of your sock, you will have slipped the first stitch of each row. That gives you a lovely big stitch to pick up these mysterious stitches from. Let me show you:

At the start of this video I’ve got to the end of the last heel turn row, so it’s time to pick up those stitches. That bit I’m showing you by my left thumb is the lovely big slipped stitches along the side of the heel flap.

To pick up and knit stitches from along there, you insert your right hand needle under both loops of one of those stitches, and then wrap your yarn and knit as normal. Do that right up the side of the heel flap for as many stitches as the pattern tells you, and you’re good to go.

(A little tip: try and make sure you pick up one of your stitches right up in the corner where the heel flap starts. That should stop you getting any little holes there)

Is that it? Have I turned a heel now?

Yes. Yes you have.

See, I told you it wasn’t hard. If you want to give it a shot, you’ll find the links to buy the Ya Basic pattern below. And don’t forget that 10% of all sales goes to the wonderful Bluebell Care.

Buy Ya Basic on Ravelry
Buy Ya Basic on Payhip
Buy Ya Basic on Lovecrafts

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Team toe up: why knitting socks toe up is the best

Lace and rib socks

Before I started knitting socks, I had absolutely no idea how on earth people managed to do it. I couldn’t get my head around the construction at all. Heels, in particular, baffled me. And it turns out that there are very many ways to knit a sock, and that indeed many of those ways have to do with heels. But there is a big battleground in the handknit sock world that I wasn’t expecting; whether you knit them top down, or toe up.

I’ve surprised myself by having incredibly strong opinions on this one. Indeed, in this Blur vs Oasis, or NSync vs Backstreet Boys, or other 90s musical analogy of a showdown, I fall firmly in the toe up camp.

Toe up socks are, as my three year old would state, “brilliant amazing”. Let me tell you why.

Starting knitting with the toe feels like magic

My favourite way to start knitting toe up socks – and the one you’ll find in my patterns – is with Judy’s magic cast-on. And trust me, this cast-on lives up to its name.

You start with a slipknot, you wiggle the needle around the yarn a bit, and then you’ve got a load of stitches on your needle. Start working in some increases at the edges, and you’ve suddenly got a sock toe.

And believe me, a little toe all on its own is very cute.

You can try toe up socks on as you go. Easily.

I don’t know if you’ve ever attempted to try on a pair of top down socks while you’re in the middle of knitting them, but it’s an absolute arse. You’ve got to adjust all your stitches across the needles, try and get your foot through without knocking any over to somewhere they shouldn’t be. If you’ve already turned the heel this is an absolute nightmare. Even if you haven’t, the fact that the needles are the last thing your foot comes to makes it something of a challenge.

Work in progress yellow sock being tried on

With toe up socks, you just put your foot in them. You can hold them by the needles, and pull them up. Simple.

Perfect foot length every time.

They’ve got a roomier gusset

Minds out of gutters, people. We’re talking the bit of the sock before you get to the heel turn, where your foot starts chunking up a bit.

If, like me, you have insanely wide plank feet then the extra stitches added to a toe-up gusset are you friends. Because seriously, my feet are the same shape as a your standard plank of wood. That period in the early 00s where all shoes were super pointy was a nightmare.

It’s really easy to add a decorative bind-off and jazz your socks up

I like to make my socks a little bit fancy. My Party As a Verb socks use a picot cast-off so they’ll look extra great peeking over the tops of ankle boots. This kind of thing is simple to do with a toe-up sock. And, because the cuff is the last bit you get to, you can decide to add a picot on a whim.

Picot cast-off on blue Party As a Verb handknit socks

Sure, if you’re knitting top down you could do a provisional cast-on and then go back and do something jazzy at the end, but I got tired just typing that out.

It’s super obvious how long to make the leg of your sock

Farewell, yarn chicken. There’s nothing worse than getting towards the end of your second sock and realising you don’t actually have enough yarn left to get to the toe. It’s an occupational hazard of the top-down knitter. So easy to get carried away with a lovely long leg and not leave yourself enough to work with.

That’s not going to happen if you toe-up it though. Especially if you’re one of those clever people who divides their yarn into two balls, so they’ve got one for each sock. You can just keep going until you run out of yarn.

Time to try out a toe up sock pattern?

Just in case I’ve not made myself totally clear: I’m all about team toe up. That’s why toe up is the method you’ll find in my patterns

Although, as with all rules, I make one exception: chunky bed socks. Which is a good thing, because they’re coming your way soon.

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Why I’m supporting Bluebell Care

Something you may or may not know about Woolly Badger knitting patterns is that 10% of all sales goes to Bristol-based perinatal mental health charity Bluebell Care. I possibly haven’t talked about it enough up until now, because I’ve been so busy trying to get patterns ready and test knits done and websites built and all that other bumpf that goes into a knitting pattern business that isn’t just sitting and doing some knitting.

But I want to be very clear on why it is that I’m supporting Bluebell by donating a portion of every single sale I make. It’s because they’re truly amazing, and very possibly saved my life.

I’ve had struggles with anxiety and depression in the past, and spent my late 20s on and off medication, before finally deciding (somewhere around my 30th birthday) that I just needed the boost that antidepressants give me to be able to function properly. I’ve spent the best part of a decade in therapy. I stopped drinking. I started walking absolutely everywhere. I quit my high-stress job, and moved out of London to Bristol, which is a way more chilled city.

In short, I did everything you’re supposed to do to help manage mental ill-health, and on the whole, it worked pretty well.

But, after the birth of my second son last year, I found myself dealing with the scarily familiar relentless weeping and feelings of hopeless failure. I knew what it was. I knew what was coming. And I felt totally and utterly powerless to stop it; after all, I’d done all the Right Things and still found myself buried under postnatal depression.

It was awful.

Thank God, though, for Bluebell. I will be singing their praises for the rest of my life. At a point where I was properly despondent, they came along and they helped me. The thing that makes Bluebell different – and, in my opinion, properly amazing – is that the women who work and volunteer there have all experienced perinatal depression and/or anxiety. And they’ve come through it, and got well, and committed to helping other women. They are literal lifesavers.

Back in the winter, when I was feeling Not Good, I was assigned a Bluebell Buddy who came out and talked to me and supported me. I was gently encouraged to go along to Bluebell Place, their hub in the centre of Bristol (which has been closed thanks to Covid, but will hopefully be back soon), and join in some of their weekly groups. They gave me a spot on their Mum’s Comfort Zone course, which was perhaps the single biggest help in my recovery.

And when the pandemic hit, they kept their support going through phonecalls, and their facebook page, and even put me forward for a course on Maternal Journal (another thing well worth looking at).

And they did all this for free. FOR FREE. I didn’t have to pay a single penny for all this support. Families can access their support regardless of income, which is truly remarkable for mental health.

So, of course I want to give something back to them. Of course I do.

Plus, knitting and mental health are good bedfellows. I’ve long believed in the soothing power of knitting. I think it’s the combination of repetitive movement being enough to calm me down, with the sense of achievement from actually making something. I’ve never really analysed it too much, if I’m honest. All I know is that knitting makes me feel better, and that’s all I really need to know. So if I can help other women feel better by donating some of my sales, then I’m going to.

I’m hoping that one day soon I’ll be able to support them in person as well; pre-Covid, Bluebell ran a knitting and crochet drop in called “Woolly Wednesday”, and I’m planning to go and help out there as soon as I possibly can. Because sometimes you do just need a nice cup of tea, a sit down, and a bit of crafting.

You can support Bluebell directly on their JustGiving page.

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The Woolly Badger guide to yarn substitution

There’s been a lot of talk in the online knitting community over the past few days about how to make sure that knitting is financially accessible for as many people as possible. As a large part of that responsibility rests with designers, and the yarns we choose to use, I wanted to lay out my approach to choosing yarn, providing alternative options, and helping people find the yarn that will work best for them. I’ve pulled together some helpful yarn substitution resources at the end of the post, so if you’re just here for them then skip to the end.

Yarn stash shot
Yes, that’s only part of my yarn stash. Yes, I have a problem.

Ah, yarn substitution. You funny old beast. I’ll be honest; for years, I didn’t even realise yarn substitution was a thing. I thought you had to knit the pattern in the yarn that the pattern told you to knit it in, or it would all go terribly bad and wrong. Every single time. No exceptions.

I now know that not to be the case.

And I also realise that yarn substitution is actually a pretty important thing. Switching in a different yarn can be the difference between being able to afford to knit, and not. When I first got into knitting a lot of my friends assumed I was going to save myself a lot of money by being able to knit my own jumpers, and I had to explain time and again that that’s really not the case. Unless you’re willing to knit everything in acrylic (and to be clear, I have nothing against acrylic except a bit of environmental unease, but that’s a whole other blog about how sometimes slow fashion made out of acrylic can be better than a constant stream of fast fashion made in terrible conditions with supposedly ‘better’ fibres), then chances are you’ll end up spending rather a lot more on your knitwear than you would if you bought similar on the high street.

So, yes, having yarns at a variety of price points is really important if knitting is going to be accessible for as many people as possible. And having patterns that work for yarns at a variety of price points is a pretty big deal too. I used to look at patterns and think I couldn’t knit them because I couldn’t get the yarn they called for. Sometimes because I couldn’t find it, but sometimes because I just couldn’t afford it.

These days I’m lucky enough to be able to afford some really, really lovely yarn. And as a designer, I really want to support other indie businesses by using their yarns in my designs. That’s why you’ll see a lot of fancy, hand-dyed yarn used in my patterns. But I also know that won’t work for everyone; spending £20 on a single skein of hand-dyed yarn is not going to work with everyone’s budget. And crucially, not everyone will have the knowledge, or indeed the confidence, to substitute the yarn I’ve used without getting a little help from somewhere.

So, the other side of my role as a designer is supporting people who need more affordable choices. I’m not going to lie here; I am not a yarn substitution expert. My preferred method for my own projects starts with looking at yarn weight, takes a brief sojourn past fibre content, and then invariably gets wildly distracted by colourways. It’s probably not the way you should do things.

But, I’m going to put my haphazard ways aside and make sure that where I can, I’m recommending at least one more affordable yarn choice with each of my patterns. But, that’s still not really enough. The great joy of the internet is that people from all over the world can use my patterns. The great ballache of that is that not every yarn is available in every country, so it’s going to be impossible for me to recommend a yarn for every possible scenario. But I can recommend places that help.

Your local yarn store

Man, local yarn stores are great. They’re run by people who love yarn, and who seriously know their stuff. If you ever need help substituting a yarn for any pattern you’re knitting, I’d really recommend starting there.

Now, I know not everyone is lucky enough to have a local yarn store they can just drop along to. But one of the (very few) good things about the Covid-19 pandemic is that more and more people are trading online, including yarn stores. Chances are a quick google will be able to bring up someone who will be happy to help you via phone or email, and then post your goods out to you.

Online resources

Now, I could write a nice blog about which fibres behave similarly, and which swapouts work particularly well. I could, but I’d largely be making it up. So instead, I’m going to point you towards some other resources from people who really do know what they’re talking about.

So there you go. That’s the Woolly Badger guide to doing yarn substitution the right way, as opposed to the haphazard way. Writing this post has almost convinced me to start following my own advice.

Almost.

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THe story of the Beatrice shawl

The lace and stocking stitch Beatrice shawl pattern may have just launched, but technically, its goes back to 1997. I’d just moved back to the UK after a stint in Australia, and I started at a new school. Which was where I met the friend after whom the Beatrice shawl is named.

But I can’t really claim that that was the genesis of the shawl, because back then I couldn’t even knit. And I definitely wasn’t planning to design any knitted accessories for my new friend. My main design ambitions were around having the best binder collage of snipped-out pictures from J17 and Bliss magazine. Important stuff when you’re in year 8.

Beatrice shawl opened up on one side to show lace detailing

So no, I’m not going to start this tale in 1997. We’re going to skip over 23 years of friendship, through the copied homework and the underage drinking and the gig-going and the time she locked me in the basement over a particularly fraught game of Who’s In The Bag and straight to where we are.

The knackered mum years. For since that first classroom encounter, between us we’ve gained four children, a shared interest in colourful crafts, and a total of about 6 hours sleep each.

The tale of the Beatrice shawl actually starts with the Great Shawl Frenzy of 2020, when my reaction to the absolute nightmare shitshow of a year that is 2020 seemed to be to knit shawls. Lots of shawls. All the shawls. Two things drew me to them; no seaming, and minimal ends. I do not like seaming, and I do not like sewing in ends. I especially do not like doing them when I’m a bit stressed, which this being 2020, I obviously was/am.

And so I found myself WhatsApping a lot of shawl photos to my friend, who did me the wonderful service of pretending to be interested. And then it happened; I found a load of mustard yellow lace yarn hiding in my stash. Just sitting, there, looking at me. Asking me to make it into a beautiful lace shawl.

Detail of mustard yellow lace shawl edging

Now, among the things Bea-the-person has introduced me to over the years is the incredible joy of mustard yellow. As a ginger I’d always steered clear of every colour except blue and green, because late 90s/early 00s TV and women’s journalism had convinced me that they were the only options for me. Then I had kids and the combination of jealousy of heir wardrobes and just not giving a crap anymore led me to decide my previous colour combinations – or lack thereof – were boring. Enter: Bea and her array of mustard yellow.

So obviously, this yarn (the Yarn Collective Portland lace in Keeping Bees, if you fancy some for yourself) was telling me that I had to make it into a shawl for Bea. But this was where I got adventurous; rather than spamming her with another 5,294 photos of potential shawls to knit I decided to go in a different direction.

I was going to design something just for her.

Of course, being as she lives in London and I’m in Bristol, this process still involved a lot of WhatsApp spam. But it was new spam. Spam of lace patterns from stitch dictionaries. Spam of shawl shapes. Spam of terribly executed sketches from my newly-purchased design notebook. I asked her to pick her favourites, and then I committed to Frankenstein’s monstering the whole lot together.

It was not as difficult as I expected it to be.

In amongst the chaos and catastrophe of 2020, it was actually really bloody good to have something to focus on and get completely absorbed by. I sat next to my eldest’s trainset as he crashed his Thomas trains, calculating stitch counts. I worked out the best order to use the lace motifs in. I sketched out lace charts and sorted out the placement of the pattern repeats. I did yet another shonky sketch, and then I told Bea I was good to go.

And thus began the Great Unknown Knit. I had a theoretical lace shawl in my notebook, but no idea if it would actually work in reality. The stocking stitch bands were fine; you just keep knitting back and forth. Perfect, soothing crafting fodder. But as I got to each lace panel I had small-scale terror that my maths would be wrong and I’d have to go right back to the start.

It wasn’t. And I didn’t.

Instead, I ended up with the shawl you see in the photos. Lightweight, lacy, and of course mustard yellow. It’s a good’un. I’m proud of it. It’s a testament to enduring friendship, and the soothing power of knitting, and the joy of a good pop of colour.

You can get your hands on the Beatrice shawl pattern in three places, which are all listed below. I hear you can even knit it in colours other than mustard yellow.