Last June I shared a room with Rachel Coopey at TNNA. We hadn’t met before but we got along really well and at the end of the stay we did a book swap. I’ve wanted to do a blog post on her book since then but thanks to a hectic summer it’s taken me until the end of the August!

Rachel is a sock designer that lives in the UK and she shares my love of bright vivid yarn colours. Her most recent self-published book, Coop Knits Socks, is a collection of 10 sock patterns in wonderful yarns with a variety of colourwork, lace and cables. I don’t design an awful lot of socks so it was very interesting to hear Rachel’s thoughts on different design topics from a sock perspective. How do you present gauge when the finished product is always stretched? Should sock photography show the model or just the sock? Which direction should the sock be knit from?

So how does Rachel answer these questions in her book? Well, she gives a big variety of gauges in st st and unstretched pattern in the book so you can have the best chance possible to match gauge. She likes photographs when at least one from the spread shows the model in full length. I hadn’t thought too much about this before and especially when the book is completely about socks it gives you a bit more context I think. It’s a bit disconcerting to never see a models face!

Rachel’s design preference is for top down so that’s the construction type you’ll find in this book. This is my personal favourite also, having a high arch I find that it’s easier to adjust the gusset length this way.

As an added bonus all of the patterns in the book are both fully written out and charted. So no matter how you take your patterns you’ll love using the book!

So now lets take a little peek at the book….I’m going to start with a couple of my favourites:

Dawlish

These socks are my complete favourites, wonderful colour, cables in socks which I love and they’re even photographed with Converse….

Willowherb

These socks use a combination of lace and twisted stitches to create very wearable socks. Just look at that great vibrant Fyberspates yarn!

Here is a taste of a few more socks:

Saxifrage

Paignton

If you want to see all the socks go check out the ravelry page here.

The electronic version of the book is available there also. To get a print copy of the book you can find it here. Each of her paper versions also comes with a free electronic copy.