Rachel Coopey Archives - Tinking Turtle

Welcome to the last day of or week of 5: 5 designers, 5 interviews, 5 designs, all to celebrate the newest issue of Sockupied, now out in an easy-to-download PDF. If you’ve missed the previous days, let me catch you up: Monday was Amy Palmer, Tuesday Kate Atherley, Wednesday M.K. Nance, and Thursday Mone Drager. A point of housekeeping: the contest will run through the weekend, with winners announced next week.

Today we have Rachel Coopey, author of three books: Toasty, Socks, Socks Vol. 2, and A Knitted Sock Society. If you think Kate Atherley designed a lot of socks, think again: of Rachel’s 195 published designs, 148 of them are sock patterns – a whopping 75%. Rachel’s socks are serious business: she favors the Heel Flap over any other heel style. This isn’t the first time Rachel and I have been in Sockupied together – we were in last year’s Spring Sockupied too! I interviewed her then – almost exactly a year ago! This year in Sockupied, Rachel’s Laith Socks feature a stitch pattern that moves from one foot to the other – creating a fun set of fraternal twin socks.

If you were to describe your socks as an animal, what would it be? Why?
Rachel: Something warm, maybe a bear? Something that symbolises how much we need hand-knitted socks in the current freezing weather!

You’ve created a lot of sock patterns. Do you ever come up with an idea, or sketch out a theme just to realize that you’ve already created something similar? How do you keep your designs fresh?
Rachel: No, I don’t think so. I mean socks are similar in that they are mostly the same shape but there’s an endless combination of stitches and fabric techniques. When I do think I can’t design anything new I suppose I’ll stop but I don’t think that will be soon!

All of the designers were working on socks during the Summer of 2014. What else were you working on or thinking of as you created your pattern?
Rachel: I was pretty busy working on my new book, Coop Knits Socks Volume 2, I was knitting samples and writing patterns, we had lovely weather this summer so I mostly worked in the garden, it was pretty nice! I also attend a lot of Fibre events and shows and last summer was particularly hectic, I was at Woolfest, Unwind Brighton and Fibre East in the space of 4 weeks so that was fun but exhausting!

Did you run into any problems or challenges when you were working on designing the socks or writing the pattern? What was your favorite part of creating Laith?
Rachel: They flew off the needles with no problems, I love working with Opal yarn, it’s one of my absolute all-time favourite sock yarns and the colour was great. I love designing non-identcal socks, ones that don’t exactly match across the pair but are strongly related – sometimes called fraternal socks. I think it really helps with second-sock-syndrome and keeps things interesting.

What are 3-5 things you are loving lately?
Rachel: The Robert Galbrath books – I love a good mystery and these didn’t disappoint me.

The new Bjork album and TV series Fortitude – are intensifying my already intense desire to visit Iceland. (Fortitude is set in Svalbard but filmed in Iceland). I have a husband who is all but allergic to the cold weather so I suspect my adventure there may be alone.

The new Arne & Carlos Regia sock yarns – these are great self patterning yarns in interesting colours, they are selling out everywhere though so if you see them you should snap them up before they disappear!

This week’s just a week of interviews for Rachel – in addition to Laith Socks, Rachel has an interview in Sockupied by Rachel Atkinson! Learn Rachel’s favorite shoes, her favorite knitting drinks,
knitting tips and more!

Rachel’s socks are done in Zwerger Garn’s Opal Uni Solid. As part of the contest, Opal’s distributor in the US, Unicorn Books & Crafts has generously offered up a skein of Opal Uni to go with our issue of Sockupied!

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!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Rachel Coopey creates the most amazing socks. And’s she’s rather prolific too. She’s also the creator of the Bockleton Socks, which feature distinctive color-work around the ankle. She’s stopped by to answer some questions today about her design process, plus some silly questions I threw in.

How did you come up with the colorwork and stitch pattern?

When I was designing the colourwork patterns I used in these socks I doodled with a pencil for a while, when I came up with something I liked I transferred it to a chart making program and worked on it a bit more before I started to swatch. I wanted a textured pattern for the foot, something simple but interesting to knit.

Where there difficulties you encountered as you worked on the pattern?

It’s important to make sure your stranded knitting isn’t too tight, it won’t have as much stretch as stockinette stitch and it need to be able to go over the heel when you put the socks on. Some knitters use a larger needle for colourwork and a smaller needle for the non-colourwork sections in order to get the same gauge on the different sections.