S3 E8: Colourwork Socks, Floats and Finding Your Niche with Charlotte Stone | StoneKnits

Charlotte Stone, better known as StoneKnits, has turned her love of playful colourwork socks into a distinctive design career and three books: Charming Colorwork Socks, Joyful Colorwork Socks and Whimsical Colorwork Socks. In this episode of the Yarn Library podcast, Charlotte explains how it happened almost by accident. She began sharing the socks she genuinely loved knitting, people started asking for the patterns, her toadstool socks went viral and eventually a publisher came calling. We talk about what happens when one design suddenly takes off, the pressure to repeat that success and why finding your creative niche may be less about strategy than recognising the kind of making that suits your brain. Charlotte also challenges some familiar advice about catching floats in stranded colourwork. She explains why catching floats after a fixed number of stitches can make colourwork socks too tight, and why the physical length of the float matters more than the stitch count. We also discuss Charlotte’s ambitions to design garments, the designs that refuse to work, test knitting an entire book, knitting things that bore you, transparent boots, Adam’s deep resistance to sock knitting and why knitting is definitely not brain surgery. This is a funny, thoughtful conversation about colourwork knitting, sock design, creativity and building a career around the thing you genuinely love doing. Charlotte Stone: @stoneknits Adam Cleevely: @CleevelyKnits Subscribe for more conversations with knitters, designers and some of the most interesting people in the knitting world.