Loom Knitting Roundup

I’m still here! Still sick, still suffering, still trying to work out what’s wrong with the body I’m trapped in (and finding out some things, but not others, and still nowhere closer to a treatment).

As a side effect of all of the above, my sewing mojo deserted me entirely for January, February, and March. I did sew a quick pullover in Jan and pyjama bottoms in Feb/March but I just have no energy or will to take photos or sit up and write blog posts and socials (I will eventually). I didn’t make anything for birthday this year, either – I just didn’t have the will to come up with something and didn’t want to force it.

Sewing’s loss is loom knitting’s gain, however, and because I can loom knit lying down, it’s been a great way to still scratch the itch of making and creating things. So here’s a bit of a loom knitting roundup from the first three months of 2025…

Sunset socks

My bestie gave me this yarn for Christmas, and I’ve never seen yarn packaged as two identical, small skeins before! But it absolutely makes sense for socks as you can make identical pairs really easily. So this pair is using one half of the skein, and the next, “muted heather” pair are the rest of this yarn.

I used:

• Kb Sock Loom (fine) at 56 pegs
• Gusto Wool “Echoes” superwash sock 80% merino / 22% nylon (color 1519 / dye lot 68).

As per usual these days, I prefer to loom knit TOE UP!

1. Kitchener cast-on with waste yarn anchor
2. Toe
3. 75 rows knit – foot
4. Eye of Partridge heel
5. (Seal up the toe)
6. 45 rows of K2, P2
7. Stretchy bind off

I absolutely love the gradients between the colours in this yarn! I actually think it might be the nicest colour transitions of any yarn I’ve used yet!

Muted heather socks

After the above socks, I had a little less than half of each skein leftover (42g instead of 50g), so I immediately cast on to make a sister to the other pair.

As before, I used:

• Kb Sock Loom (fine) at 56 pegs
• Gusto Wool “Echoes” superwash sock 80% merino / 22% nylon (color 1519 / dye lot 68).

This photo just shows the difference between what a sock looks like right off the loom vs letting it relax for a few dsays before blocking…

The method for this pair was very similar as above:

1. Kitchener cast-on with waste yarn anchor
2. Toe
3. 75 rows knit – foot
4. Eye of Partridge heel
5. (Seal up the toe)
6. 25 rows of K2, P2
7. Stretchy bind off

I’m not sure which pair I prefer more, but I love how different these colours are between them – one is so bright and vibrant, the other so muted and calming.

Chunky leaf cowl

After two pairs of socks in a row, I thought I’d use up one of the other yarns I got for Christmas – a chunky recycled sage green yarn. The company iinouiio seemed to have paused production to re-pivot, but their yarns are actually recycled from donated sweaters, which are sorted by colour and then broken down and re-spun into yarns! How cool is that!?

I don’t often knit with chunky yarns so I only had one ball to pair with it in my stash – leftover of the (quite itchy!) Icelandic yarn I bought when we were in Reykjavik in 2018 and I made a hat from shortly after.

• Kb Flexee Loom Chunky – 54 (not 72!!) pegs
• iinouiio Chunky yarn in “Giddy grazing” 97% wool/3% other (80% recycled) & Álafosslopi 100% wool colour 9975
• AlterKnit Stitch Dictionary book “Cottonwood” pattern

I wasn’t quite sure how many pegs I’d need for a cowl and I was seeing wildly different numbers in online patterns, even for my exact loom! I first cast on at 72 pegs, but then after about 20 rows it was obviously waaaaaaay too big so I ripped it back and started again at 54 pegs. My leaf stitch pattern was 18 pegs so I couldn’t really cut the pattern in half without it looking weird.

1. cast on
2. 5 rows k2p2 (green)
3. 40 rows colourwork (2.5 repeats)
4. 5 rows k2p2 (green)
5. Stretchy bind off

Thankfully 54 pegs is snug, but much better than the 72!

Loom knitting my purple VL hat late last year reminded me what a PITA it is to knit chunky yarns on fine gauge looms, so I’m glad I remembered that and used a wider gauge loom for this one. The resulting knitting is no less dense or warm, and it’s way less of a struggle to work with. Even so, I found I still couldn’t flat stitch at all here and had to do a proper knit stitch every single time, which slowed me down and made me miss sock knitting!

Contrast purple VL socks

Just as I was finishing up the cowl, a friend was having a really bad time of things so I wanted to make her a special pair of Vampire Lestat socks to remind her that a) people care about her, and b) she has great things to look forward to. I thought I’d be seeing her in a fortnight so I rushed to finish the pair by then, only she got sick so we had to postpone anyway. She was very happy to receive them in March, nonetheless!

These are very similar to my own VL socks I made last year, only this time I made contrast toes and heels.

• Kb Sock Loom (fine) at 56 pegs
• Mothy & the Squid merino sock yarn in “Distant Galaxies” 75% merino / 25% nylon and Glendale Fibres Standard Sock in “Violet” 75% superwash merino / 25% nylon

As always, I did these TOE UP!

1. Kitchener cast-on with waste yarn anchor
2. Toe (in Violet!)
3. 75 rows knit – foot (in dark purple)
4. Eye of Partridge heel (in Violet!)
5. (Seal up the toe)
6. 10 rows knit
7. 30 rows of VL pattern (32×30 on outside ankles)
8. 10 rows knit
9. 5 rows of K2, P2
10. Stretchy bind off

Just like with my own pair, I used three small bundles of the violet yarns to make the VL logo on each ankle so I could minimise the “carraige returns” I needed to do after each row to get back to the start for the next row (rather than carrying the yarn the whole way around). This seems to work pretty well for making neat and tidy insides!

Turquoise Creeping sock FAIL

This last one is maybe less of a fail and more of a learning opportunity? I wanted something really complicated along the foot as well as the ankle to slow me down a little, so I picked a complicated colourwork stitch pattern from my book and two yarns in my stash.

• Kb Sock Loom (fine) at 60 pegs (max!)
• Rico superba Cashmeri luxury sock yarn colour 018 (teal) dye lot 2538 (65% virgin wool / 25% polyamide / 10% cashmere) & Mothy & the Squid merino sock yarn in “Pig-Nosed Purple Frog” (75% merino / 25% nylon)
• AlterKnit Stitch Dictionary book “Creeping” pattern (20×14)

I’d bought the teal cashmere yarn on our ill-fated trip to Berlin in 2023 and it’s just SO SOFT I knew it’d make amazingly cosy socks.

TOE UP!

• Kitchener cast-on with waste yarn anchor
• Toe (in teal)
• 75 rows knit – foot (in teal & purple colourwork)
• Eye of Partridge heel (in teal)
• (Seal up the toe)
• 37 rows of colourwork pattern
• 5 rows of K2, P2
• Stretchy bind off



These colours ended up giving me massive 1990s nostalgia, but the foot ended up being waaaaaay too long, even though I used the same number of rows I always do!? So my learning here is that colourwork clearly makes the rows finish longer than standard knit (or knit & purl combo). And trust me, it is bunched up a bit on the blocker here – it is way too long to be shrunk into place with blocking!

I’ll end up unpicking this sock and reusing the yarns together for something else. After I finished this lonely sock, I cast on this same pattern in different yarns, and used 56 rows for the foot instead of 75. This seems to be a much saner foot length, so it wasn’t a total waste of time!