Workshops with Charlotte Stone 19 – 24 October, 2025
For all the workshops, there will be one teacher and two skilled assistants to help you, ensuring personalized guidance tailored to individual learning speeds.
Workshop 1
Charlotte´s Best Tips and Tricks for Colourwork sock knitting
During the workshop we will cover the following topics:
- An exploration of the main issues knitters have with knitting colourwork socks. Charlotte will share her expert tips on how to successfully overcome them.
- Discuss yarn choices and colours for your colourwork socks to pop
- Learn to measure gauge and how to correct your gauge if it does not match the pattern
- Correctly measure foot size to get colourwork socks to successfully fit, for whoever you are knitting your socks for.
- Learn to read and knit a colourwork chart.
- Techniques for knitting stranded colourwork knitting with 2 colours – English style knitting, Continental style knitting or holding threads in both hands. Charlotte will demonstrate each method and help you choose which method is best and most enjoyable for you.
- Float management in colourwork socks.
- We will start knitting one of Charlotte´s sock patterns together using two colours only.
Requirements
- Sock Knitting Experience: We recommend having knitted a plain pair of socks for the experience. However, adjustments can be made if you would prefer to knit a legwarmer or cuff for your wrist (in the round) instead of a sock.
- Knitting needles: 5-6 DPNs – Or for magic loop method: round 9 inch circular needles
- 50g amounts of fingering weight yarns in contrasting colours to knit a pair of colourwork socks.
- Tape measure and stitch markers (or scrap yarn for stitch markers)
Workshop 2
How to design your own Stranded Colourwork Motives for your personal knitwear projects
During the workshop we will cover the following topics:
- Charlotte will share where she personally finds inspiration for her colourwork motives.
- We will discuss the importance of trying to avoid copying other knitted designs that are already in existence and how to check if other designs already exist that we are wanting to create.
- Together we will draw our motif ideas on paper on a sketch of an actual sock/accessory/garment and discuss the overall appearance of the design and ideas that work well and are aesthetically pleasing.
- Explore texture details such as purl stitches, bobbles, ribbing or different yarn textures to help add 3D effects to our designs.
- We will learn about colour theory and how to choose shades that work well together and contrast well for your colourwork motif.
- Charlotte will demonstrate how to design a 12 stitch repeating motif using graph paper and free online computer programme stitch fiddle
- Learn about float managements for a knitted design and the importance of knitability for a motif that we are creating.
- We will knit a swatch of our design motifs in the class. Charlotte will provide advice and feedback for your design!
- Discuss what to do and how to correct your motif (if necessary), once we have knitted the swatches to help improve our designs.
- Charlotte will also share some of her own ´design disasters´ that she has had to overcome with her self-published and book designs and how she was able to fix and learn them.
Requirements
- You need to know how to knit colourwork in the round. This technique will previously have been taught in Workshop 1.
- A set of colouring pencils
- Scraps of left-over yarn in many colours and all in one yarn weight. We recommend fingering-weight sock yarn.
- Appropriate needle size for the yarn you are bringing to knit your design in a swatch. We recommend a set of needles between 2.25mm and 3mm needles for fingering weight sock yarn. Charlotte often recommends going up a needle size or two for the colourwork section.
Workshop 3
Successfully knitting the retreat design together
In this workshop we will work on a special colourwork hat that Charlotte designed especially for this retreat! You will learn more techniques for knitting advanced colourwork successfully.
- Take accurate measurements and look at gauge for a perfect fit for our retreat design.
- Charlotte will demonstrate methods for knitting 3 colours in one round using the design from the retreat.
- Incorporating duplicate stitch details in the design where necessary and how to do this. We will discuss where we can do this instead of knitting 3 colours in one round if preferred too.
- Help with choosing alternate colours for the retreat design together.
- Demonstrate Ladderback Jacquard technique to help manage long floats.
- Blocking tips and tricks for our final projects.
Gift bag
Each knitter will receive an exclusive Artisan Retreats gift bag!