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Authors: Clara Parkes
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Not until I fell in love with socks did I realize how serious my seam problem was. I learned to knit socks the old-fashioned way, working a top-down, flap-and-gusset pattern on four double-pointed needles. I was so excited about having turned my first heel that I temporarily forgot where I was headed. Once you reach the toe, no matter how you slice itâand weâve come up with a lot of waysâyou end up with stitches that need to be brought together. Because the space between foot and shoe is quite cramped and in a constant state of agitation, you canât just staple the two sides together and hope nobody notices. You need something smooth and strong, and only one stitch does the trick. Itâs called Kitchener.
A little background: During World War I, Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener served as Britainâs Secretary of State for War. He assembled the largest volunteer army the British Empire had ever seen, his stern, mustachioed face appearing on countless posters above the words, âWants You.â He teamed up with the Red Cross to rally knitters in England, Canada, and the United States. They cranked out countless handknits for the men fighting in the trenches. Legend has it Kitchener designed a sock with a new kind of seamless toe that promised to be comfortable on soldiersâ feet. That seamless toe technique is what we call Kitchener stitch today.
A lot of people liked Lord Kitchener. Heâd done remarkable things while serving in the Sudan. But during the Second Boer War, he used brutal scorched-earth tactics and sent 154,000 Boer and African civilians into concentration camps, which earned him many enemies. Kitchener died in 1916 when, while traveling to Russia for peace talks, his ship was sunk by a German U-boat. His life provided fodder for six books and movies, and his death prompted conspiracy theories that still linger on. A lifelong bachelor, Kitchener was also a collector of fine china and often surrounded himself with handsome, unmarried young soldiers referred to as âKitchenerâs band of boys.â Which is to say that Kitchener the person was as complex as Kitchener the stitch.
For years, Kitchener the stitch eluded me. It has multiple steps that involve threading yarn through each stitch twice, just so, before letting it drop off the needle forever. The instructions are usually written in a mechanical way that tells you what to do without explaining
why.
If anything distracts you along the way, if you reverse the order of your threading by mistake, if the phone rings or your bus reaches its stop, you have no framework for realizing whatâs wrong and fixing it. All too easily, youâll end up with a toe that looks like a half-eaten ear of corn, which is what my first few toes looked like.
I took those early failures as a sign that Kitchener was beyond my grasp. The next few years were spent trying to navigate seams by other means, like the illiterate person who learns to say, âI forgot my glasses, could you read that for me?â when presented with a menu. Since staples and tape were out of thequestion, I figured out how to flip my socks inside out, line up the stitches onto two needles, and marry them off, pair by pair, in what some people call a three-needle bind-off. I call it cheating. Sure, it looked reasonable from the outside. But inside the sock, my toes were unhappy about having to share their tight space with a rude, bulky seam of stitches. Every time I sidestepped Kitchener, I felt like a flop.
You can always fudge what others donât need to see. We shove stuff into closets and under the bed before company arrives, and good manners dictate that they donât go snooping. But once something leaves your hands and goes home with someone else, all the rules change. This person has free reign to scrutinize. I gave a particularly beautiful pair of cheater-toe socks to my sister-in-law, who immediately behaved as if
Not until I fell in love with socks did I realize how serious my seam problem was. I learned to knit socks the old-fashioned way, working a top-down, flap-and-gusset pattern on four double-pointed needles. I was so excited about having turned my first heel that I temporarily forgot where I was headed. Once you reach the toe, no matter how you slice itâand weâve come up with a lot of waysâyou end up with stitches that need to be brought together. Because the space between foot and shoe is quite cramped and in a constant state of agitation, you canât just staple the two sides together and hope nobody notices. You need something smooth and strong, and only one stitch does the trick. Itâs called Kitchener.
A little background: During World War I, Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener served as Britainâs Secretary of State for War. He assembled the largest volunteer army the British Empire had ever seen, his stern, mustachioed face appearing on countless posters above the words, âWants You.â He teamed up with the Red Cross to rally knitters in England, Canada, and the United States. They cranked out countless handknits for the men fighting in the trenches. Legend has it Kitchener designed a sock with a new kind of seamless toe that promised to be comfortable on soldiersâ feet. That seamless toe technique is what we call Kitchener stitch today.
A lot of people liked Lord Kitchener. Heâd done remarkable things while serving in the Sudan. But during the Second Boer War, he used brutal scorched-earth tactics and sent 154,000 Boer and African civilians into concentration camps, which earned him many enemies. Kitchener died in 1916 when, while traveling to Russia for peace talks, his ship was sunk by a German U-boat. His life provided fodder for six books and movies, and his death prompted conspiracy theories that still linger on. A lifelong bachelor, Kitchener was also a collector of fine china and often surrounded himself with handsome, unmarried young soldiers referred to as âKitchenerâs band of boys.â Which is to say that Kitchener the person was as complex as Kitchener the stitch.
For years, Kitchener the stitch eluded me. It has multiple steps that involve threading yarn through each stitch twice, just so, before letting it drop off the needle forever. The instructions are usually written in a mechanical way that tells you what to do without explaining
why.
If anything distracts you along the way, if you reverse the order of your threading by mistake, if the phone rings or your bus reaches its stop, you have no framework for realizing whatâs wrong and fixing it. All too easily, youâll end up with a toe that looks like a half-eaten ear of corn, which is what my first few toes looked like.
I took those early failures as a sign that Kitchener was beyond my grasp. The next few years were spent trying to navigate seams by other means, like the illiterate person who learns to say, âI forgot my glasses, could you read that for me?â when presented with a menu. Since staples and tape were out of thequestion, I figured out how to flip my socks inside out, line up the stitches onto two needles, and marry them off, pair by pair, in what some people call a three-needle bind-off. I call it cheating. Sure, it looked reasonable from the outside. But inside the sock, my toes were unhappy about having to share their tight space with a rude, bulky seam of stitches. Every time I sidestepped Kitchener, I felt like a flop.
You can always fudge what others donât need to see. We shove stuff into closets and under the bed before company arrives, and good manners dictate that they donât go snooping. But once something leaves your hands and goes home with someone else, all the rules change. This person has free reign to scrutinize. I gave a particularly beautiful pair of cheater-toe socks to my sister-in-law, who immediately behaved as if
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