A friend just sent this to me and I love it. A day devoted to knitting in public. This year it’s Saturday June 13. To find a public knitting event near you, go to the official Knit in Public Day website.

Not that you should only knit in public once a year. Just yesterday I was at one of my favorite Portland area cafes (conveniently located just a couple doors down from the Twisted yarn shop) working on a pair of socks. I’ve been working on these socks for what seems like forever… but really I started them a long time ago and put them down to work on bigger projects. One I recently finished: Absorba the Great Bathmat from the Mason-Dixon Knitting Curious Knitters’ Guide (my current favorite knitting book) and I love the finished project. So cushy and comfortable, it makes me want to knit carpet for the whole house. For the bathmat I went with four strands instead of the pattern dictated three. That made it a little difficult to knit, so for the next one (and there will be a next one) I’ll probably just go with the recommended three strands. We’re about to remodel one of our bathrooms and I’m thinking red for that one.

The main knitting project I’m working on right now is way too big to haul around to various cafes. A large wool blanket just isn’t that portable. But I’m really close. Hopefully by the end of June I can do the final bind-off and post some pics. I have lots of traveling to do this summer (tradeshows with our socks), so I’m going to have to decide on some new, smaller projects to keep me busy on the road.

Two posts in one day! So in the mail today I got an awesome t-shirt. Maybe it’s only extra funny to me because I work with mismatched socks every day. But I love the concept of the shirt – that there are little communities of tiny people living under the dryer and they are the ones who take all the socks. It’s kinda like Fraggle Rock, but with socks.

Anyhoo… the shirt is on sale over at Noise Bot. I got mine for only $5 through their online outlet over at eBay, but it looks like they don’t have any left in the eBay store. You can still get one for only $12 through the regular Noise Bot website – which is still a great price for a super fun shirt.

Yikes… Not sure how I let so much time go by without a real update. It’s probably because after the trades how season I went on vacation for a month and was busy writing a blog about traveling through Thailand. But vacation has been over for awhile now and I don’t have any truly valid excuses for ignoring the Socklady Blog.

Thailand & Cambodia were pretty hot and most of the time was spent wearing flip flops (which was heavenly since it was still winter back home), but I still found a few good opportunities to wear socks.

I had my Poppy socks on one of the days we were hiking around Angkor Wat in Cambodia (look at that great foot placement! can you tell I’ve done some sock modeling before?):

Here I was wearing an old pair of wool socks one chilly morning in Khao Sok (jungle in Southern Thailand):

Alas vacation is over and it’s back to work. Our little sock empire is thriving and we’re continuing to have a blast (really, how could we not when we all hang out in such great, cheerful socks). We’ve got some exciting new products that will be coming out later this summer and of course a new color for the Autumn Series of our adult socks.

We received an email from a customer saying we should start up a Facebook page. That was an easy request to fulfill. For all who want to digitally declare their love for our socks, you can now become a Facebook Fan of Solmate Socks.

If you’re a Solmate Socks retailer, we’ve got some wholesale specials running now through the end of June. Login to the wholesale website to find out what these promotions are.

I’m nearly done with my current knitting project. It’s been ahwhile since I posted any knitting projects because I’ve been working for a really long time on this amazing blanket (very colorful, of course). That blanket still isn’t done, but I took a little break from knitting that to knit a bathmat, which also isn’t done. I thought I had it finished last night, but when I put it in the bathroom it just wasn’t quite big enough. So I’ll add a bit more to it and then post a picture of it.

Oh, that reminds me… I did have another knitting project I finished recently. I was just looking at a picture of Andy & I celebrating our birthdays. As part of this amazing city-wide scavenger hunt our sweethearts  organized for our birthday, we got a gift certificate to Twisted, our favorite yarn shop in Portland (they have a huge selection of sock yarns for you sock knitters in Portland, OR). I giggled when I looked at this picture of me… I really do have quite an addiction to Noro yarns. The hat, the mittens and the scarf. OH! The scarf. That was a recent(ish) knitting project (maybe January-ish). It’s a great scarf. I got the pattern the striped Noro Scarf from the Brookly Tweed blog.

The pattern on the website made the scarf a bit too wide for my tastes. So I gave that big scarf to my hubby and made this second one for me with only 23 stitches instead of the 39 that the pattern calls for. I love it and it was so much fun to knit – I was so curious to see how the color striping was going to turn out and how the colors were going to play with each other.

And, as always, Andy is rockin’ the Solmate Socks hat. She’s also got on a great pair of fingerless mittens (made from recycled wool) which I picked up from Baabaazuzu last January.

A friend found this image and since it’s a kooky knit object she sent the pic on to me… I’m pretty sure we’re not going to start making these, but it’s quite funny nonetheless.

Lots to catch up on. Marianne and I are in the middle of tradeshow season (these are tradeshows where store owners find us and decide to carry our product). We started January off with a visit to Atlanta for the Atlanta International Gift & Home Furnishings Market at the AmericasMart buildings. This was our first time at this show and so we weren’t sure how it was going to go. The show went better than we could have expected and we’re excited to go back to the next show in July.

As an added bonus we were treated to an awesome home cooked meal courtesy of Lisa & Bennett (it’s amazing how treasured home cooked meals are when you spend a lot of time on the road). This is a different Lisa, as in not me, Socklady-Lisa… we’ll call her Atlanta-Lisa. So Atlanta-Lisa was one of the first Solmate Socks employees and Lisa & Bennett actually lived with Marianne for their last few months in Vermont. Lisa and Bennett moved to Atlanta several years ago and so it was a real treat to get to hang out with them and their awesome dog Jerry (a greyhound rescue). As if one home cooked meal wasn’t spoiling us enough, we were actually treated to a second by Jan from Silk Bijou – an exhibitor friend who lives in Atlanta and had some of us over to her home for an absolutely delicious dinner and some killer cocktails.

After Atlanta we got a quick break at home and then we were off to New York for another show. It was a good show, and we had another Jeero sighting:

We’re both at home right now, but getting ready for the San Francisco International Gift Fair and the Buyers Market of American Craft in Philadelphia – both of which are just around the corner.

In fact I just finished packing to leave for San Francisco in the morning. As I was packing I giggled at the contents of my suitcase. I have one big suitcase packed to the brim with mismatched socks and a couple hundred catalogs. Looking at the contents of my suitcase made me wonder what kind of crazy stuff the security screeners for checked bags see. I wonder what they think if they open my suitcase to examine its contents.

Wow. Today I got a call from Marianne who got a call from someone else telling her that they saw Pete Seeger wearing a Solmate Socks hat while singing with Bruce Springsteen at the 2009 Inaugural Concert at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC. It’s kinda crazy, exciting and extremely flattering when we see our stuff on TV – stuff from our happy little company here in Vermont – being worn by famous people… at the 2009 inaugural concert!

So of course I went looking online for an image and I was lucky enough to find a great pic of Pete, Bruce and our hat on Flickr.

If you’re wondering, the hat he’s wearing is one of our older styles of hats – a wool hat. No longer available… but I did just put our cotton thinking caps back in stock and up on our website.

Thanks Pete for enjoying our fun & colorful hat – it suits you well.

UPDATED: I just found a video of Pete Seeger singing in his Socklady hat!

UPDATE #2 (Patterns): Again, wow. We are incredibly flattered that so many people noticed Pete’s hat and went searching for its origins. The shear number of comments on this blog posting shows that. Thank you so much to everyone who has commented about how much they enjoy the hat. However, there seems to be some confusion. A great number of comments are asking for us to post the pattern so they can knit the hat themselves. We don’t actually sell our patterns – we never have. We only sell our finished products. Mainly we sell socks, but we also take our sock seconds and manufacturing overages and cut them up and sew them into our hats. We’ve discontinued our wool socks (and subsequently the hats – which is what Pete was wearing). So we don’t have more wool socks or hats around to make available.

Our little company got its start based on Marianne’s (the Socklady) passion for knitting and her creative use of color and patterns. We don’t sell our patterns, but I hope that all the other very enthusiastic knitters out there grab their needles, a couple different skeins of yarn and get creative. 

How cool!  Our socks inspired another artist! That just gives me the warm fuzzies.

It’s fun & funky jewelry and in the description of her jewelry it says that these pieces with their crazy patterns and fun color combinations were inspired by the Socklady’s socks. We see Amy (the artist) at the Paradise City Arts Festival and we always love her stuff.

Check out all of her funky jewelry.

Kids Socks on Sale
Regularly $20, On Sale $16

All of our children’s socks have been marked down to $16.00 – that’s $4 off per pair.

After listening to some feedback from a lot of our customers about our children’s “Pair With A Spare” line of socks we decided to make some small improvements. The updated line launches next year and that means we need to clear out the old styles in order to make room for the new. So stock up on the current styles since they won’t be available much longer.

See All Kids Socks

I like the daffodil color so much that I bought 2 pair so I could have one in the laundry and one on my feet.  My husband looked at me in horror the other morning and said “My dear, you have matching sox!” – Harriet

Last week we got this adorable picture from Mary Bencks (trail name: Heart Rock Mary). She is a member of a hiking group of women in New Hampshire named “The Painted Toe Solemates.” They’ve been hiking the New Hampshire White Mountains together for six years.  They heard about our socks on Prairie Home Companion back in September as they were driving home from a hike. It was fate and so the Painted toe Solemates had to have some Solmate Socks.

On one of their next hiking adventures they all wore their new Solmate Socks and they were kind enough to take a picture and share it with us. Here they are, with their sock clad feet in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, on top of Mt. Moriah. Hopefully on their next outing they’ll snap a pic that includes thier faces and their sock clad feet. To the ladies of the Painted Toe Solemates – thanks for sharing! You’re fabulous.

Anyway, we all LOVE our socks.  How can anyone feel grouchy when their feet look so happy! – Heart Rock Mary

The Painted Toe Solemates hiking in New Hampshire