Working on tiny feet. The first photo shows my first prototype, which was made more or less like a very simple sock and came out very nicely, but it’s built on an 8-stitch tube and I need it to be built on a 4- or 5-stitch tube. I started with 8 stitches to experiment on as that’s MUCH easier to work with, but haven’t managed to downsize it successfully yet. Second photo shows the good prototype in the center surrounded by several smaller but unsuccessful test pieces, using different techniques—making it like a real sock, like a simplified Christmas stocking, like a slipper, as a gently curved tube, etc.
So why the focus on a 4-stitch tube? Because that’s about the smallest tube you can crochet. It has served as kind of a benchmark as I try to work ever smaller—when I can make a 4-stitch tube consistently with a particular thread and hook combination, I can feel I’m working with it successfully. And because it’s the smallest construction unit I can make, it’s what gets assigned to the smallest stick-like parts of any animal or human figure—forelegs, neck, etc. Everything else is sized up from there—if the calf of a leg is 4 stitches, the thigh might be 5 stitches. And so on. So I need my tiny foot to be 4 or 5 stitches around, transitioning into a 4-stitch tube for the calf.
Although now that I’ve written that it occurs to me that I haven’t actually tried a 3-stitch tube with heavier (thus easier to see and handle) yarn, just to see if it might be possible…I think, in the end, a 3-stitch tube will be impossible to see the hollow center of, so would be very difficult to manipulate. Also, I’ve never seen a pattern calling for a 3-stitch tube, and I’ve read references to the 4-stitch tube being the smallest practical size. But I have to laugh at the fact that the moment I wrote down that 4 stitches was the smallest workable tube I felt compelled to question my own statement.
