I'm not sure how the tradition began, but back in the 1950's (when some of us were born, but I'm not saying exactly who) there were lots of patterns and kits available to make knitted Christmas stockings. It seemed as though it was almost a birthright to have a relative make you a stocking with your name and sometimes birth date too. The patterns were not easy! The maker of the stocking had to know how to do some pretty tricky color intarsia techniques, darn in millions of yarn ends, and how to turn the heel of a sock. The directions in the old patterns were also extremely cryptic.
Fast forward about 50 years, and now these stocking-children are becoming grandparents. It seems that many of them don't know how to perform these advanced knitting techniques, but they want to have identical stockings for the newest generation. So they hire me to copy the old ones!!! It takes me about a week or ten days to make one, and I can get $100 per stocking. I do enjoy making them (for a while), but have to admit that I get awfully sick of knitting with red, white, and green by December.
The photos show a mixture of traditional and my own patterns (click to embiggen). My favorite original pattern is the Christmas argyle shown at right.
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