Sooooocktober

Nixon was a sweating, filthy, liar, but he was right about one thing: Sock it to me! OK, to be fair, he seems somewhat apprehensive about the socking, but that’s just because he probably didn’t have any super comfy hand knit socks. Luckily, you and I don’t have that kind of problem. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the first annual Lattes & Llamas Socktober!

It’s Socktober, stiches!

You get a sock! And you get a sock!! And you get a sock!!!

There are 84 knitting days left until Christmas and I’ve basically got all of my knitting left to do. Socks are my go to gift, and I thought the only thing better than making some socks would be making some socks with all of you. Everyone needs a good sock. And I don’t want to hear even one person say they aren’t a good enough knitter to make socks. That’s crazy talk. They can seem intimidating, but they really really aren’t. You’ve got this. The requisite skills are knitting in the round, knitting, purling, increasing, and decreasing. If you can do those things, you can make socks.

We consider October the start of the unofficial-official holiday knitting season. This is that magical time that, as a people, we all realize that the days-until-gifting counter is under 100, and everyone we know thinks it’s no big deal to just whip them up a blanket. Well screw them, they get socks. To celebrate the start of the holiday knitting chaos, we are going to put a different sock yarn on sale every week this month. We’re starting today with Adventure Yarn. It’s Jac’s favorite. You don’t need a coupon code, the 20% off discount will come off automatically.

Not only that, we are going to be running a Knit-A-Long or Crochet-A-Long every week from now til December in the Lattes & Llamas Ravelry group! We are going to be running a new KAL/CAL every two weeks. Here’s how this thing will work.

We are going to make two pairs of socks in October and two hats in November. Every one of those patterns will be free. Two of them are free Ravelry downloads and two are straight from us. You’ll be able to download them here on the blog. We’ll have a thread in the Ravelry group set up for you to show off your progress and cheer each other on. The first project is MineCraft Socks by Heather Cox.

I’m going to knit these in real time with you. I really like the sort of quilted look they have. I’ll be using Adventure Yarn in Winterfell. [insert your own winter-is-coming joke here]

So who is ready to accept the challenge and make one sock a week with me this month? I’ll be sharing my progress on the Lattes & Llamas Ravelry group and on instagram. Tag your project pics with #SocktoberKAL on Twitter and Instagram, so we can all follow each other’s progress.

I’ll be officially kicking off on Monday (October 3rd), but you can join in anytime. I’ll wrap up the MineCraft Sock KAL on Sunday the 16th and we’ll start a new one on the 17th. For the second KAL, I’m using Interlude Yarn, which will go on sale October 10th. That will be a mystery KAL, and I’ll be releasing the pattern one piece at a time. It will be two at a time, toe up sock. If you want to get in on that one, grab your yarn the week of the 10th, so you can get the best price on it. We’ll be revealing some special new colors just for Socktober, so stay tuned.

In November we’ll be doing hats and one of them is a Crochet-A-Long. Both of those will be free patterns also. We’ll all be so toasty!

~Megan-Anne
This week I got shingles on my face. It’s too distracting to come up with something pithy to put here.