Cat Bordhi

Cat Bordhi has been a full-time writer and knitting detective since 2002, and also teaches knitting workshops, gives talks at knitting retreats and to knitting guilds, and teaches writing workshops.  She lives in a yarn-filled house tucked away in the woods on a remote island in the Pacific Northwest, where she is working on the Sweet Tomato Heel, another innovative sock approach in her New Pathways for Sock Knitters series, and jumping out of bed in the middle of the night with new ideas more often than is wise.  She is the indefatigable author of Socks Soar on Two Circular Needles, A Treasury of Magical Knitting, A Second Treasury of Magical Knitting, New Pathways for Socks Knitters, Personal Footprints for Insouciant Sock Knitters, and the novel Treasure Forest, and is also the creator of more than a dozen entertaining and instructive Youtube knitting videos, like “Slim and Trim SSK’s,” guaranteed to cure your SSK’s of wobbles and flabbiness.

Personal Footprints socks are knit 100% in the round. There is no purling, no short rows, no stitches to pick up, no gauge calculations, no gussets, no heel flaps, and no grafting, yet you end up with a perfect fit and a map of how to get it again and again. To keep the book simple, I included one toe and heel and kept everything but the leg in multiples of 6 stitches which works just fine.  However, there remain many alternatives, and so I welcome you to join me for a mass rebellion of intelligent minds. In this workshop, we’ll remain true to the book’s basic premise of mapping your foot on a cut-out footprint for future use, but you may choose (or invent) any toe you like, and shape the foot and fit your heel using a variety of shaping and durability techniques. I will teach and discuss a variety of toe and heel strategies, hoping to inspire you to take matters into your own hands, on your own feet, so you end up with a unique and perfectly-fitted Personal Footprint to use again and again. We will also explore different ways of incorporating design in your custom-fitted socks, to enhance fit (taking into considerations factors like elasticity and comfort), durability (several techniques will be taught), and of course, beauty.

Predictions, Investigations and Sock Design! We will spend the day reverse engineering my collection of mysterious, challenging texture swatches. As you decipher swatches and attempt to reproduce them, your understanding of knitting and ability to navigate unfamiliar territory will grow exponentially. To maximize the rewards, I’ll guide you to record not only the instructions for each swatch, but also to describe how each element alters the behavior of neighboring elements, to map out promising variations, to measure elasticity, to consider both sides and whether or not partial reversal might be worth trying, as well as other useful details.  As the day progresses, you’ll begin to notice common characteristics or behaviors among the swatches, and as you record those insights and ponder them and explore them on the needles, you’ll be working your way toward creative fluency with these elements.  By afternoon, when the room is bursting with mapped out realizations and variations, we’ll combine our knowledge to draw some conclusions, embed our discoveries in sock design, and point in promising directions for later explorations.  My goal is that this workshop kindles a life-long passion for sleuthing and recording your way through the infinite variations of knitting, and that over time you will build a personal library of investigations, swatches, and designs.