Welcome to day three of my weeklong series of interviews with the designers of Sockupied! This is the week of 5’s: 5 interviews, 5 socks, 5 yarns… all to celebrate the new format of Sockupied. On Monday we spoke to Sockupied’s editor Amy Palmer, on Tuesday, Kate Atherly. Today we have M.K. Nance.
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| © Sockupied/Harper Point |
M.K. Nance is the creator of Mill Ends Socks, named for the smallest park in Portland, Oregon. This isn’t the first time Nance and I have been together in a Sockupied Issue. The last issue was Sockupied Fall 2013, when my socks were on the cover. She had created Tryon Creek Socks, which were also named after a park in Portland. Nance has been knitting for 21 years, and is a proud 5th generation knitter!
So let’s get down to the questions:
If you were to describe your socks as an animal, what would it be? Why?
Nance: I would have to say that the socks remind me of my current dog. He is a lab/border collie/something else mix and he has a curly tail with white knee socks.
Your other two pairs of socks are also named after parks. How do you decide which parks?
Nance: My connection is simple, I mostly grew up in Portland and I currently live there. Most of the time I design the socks first and then pick the name which somehow mirrors the pattern. As there are almost 300 city parks and even more if one includes the suburbs, I doubt I’ll run out of names anytime soon.
All the designers were working on our socks during the Summer of 2014. What else were you working on or thinking of as you created your pattern?
Nance: I was knitting a
different pair of socks for a swap which was similar to Mill Ends out of yarn I
dyed with icing dyes (sadly, they are light sensitive).
Did you run into any problems or challenges when you were working on designing the socks or writing the pattern? What did you do to overcome it or problem solve it?
Nance: The pair for the
swap, I encountered several issues which I knew would happen with these
socks. The biasing around the leg made them much less elastic and so I
included a note about changing the needle size on the leg. Also getting
the cuffs to match in all the sizes caused a slight headache.
What are 3-5 things you are loving lately?
Nance: I’ve been listening
to a lot of music by Zoe Keating and Kaki King while
knitting lately.
One Geek to Craft Them All makes my favorite stitch
markers.
Tea is also essential for knitting/my design process and I’ve been drinking a
lot of Amaretto Spice.
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| © Sockupied/Harper Point |
Nance’s Mill Ends Socks are knit in Fibernymph Dye Work’s Bounce in North Sea. The socks feature a distinctive bias on the leg to imitate the swirl of traffic that surrounds the sock’s namesake.
You can get the Mill Ends socks in Sockupied – check it out!
To enter the contest, use the Rafflecopter widget below! You can enter the contest multiple times by doing different things – so have fun with it. We will have three winners to the drawing, be sure to scroll through and see all the great prizes!
