Alpaca Direct News and Perspectives

Partner Spotlight: What Makes a Dahlgren Sock so Special?

"I'll see your merino wool & raise you some alpaca!"

From colorful poker metaphors to colorful polka-dot knee-highs, our conversation yesterday with Kris Dahlgren, President of Dahlgren Footwear certainly stoked my curiosity!

Anyone who's seen (or, better yet, worn) a pair of Dahlgren socks knows they need a bit of introduction & explanation. Why?

Because they look a bit like socks that took fashion advice from microchips.

What I learned from Kris, however, is that not one square centimeter of a Dahlgren sock is arbitrary; every piece is carefully crafted to serve a very specific purpose. Ultimately, each type of sock represents an interlocking web of mechanisms engineered to provide two things: comfort & dryness.

Of the two, it sounds like comfort is much simpler to achieve. As a knitter, I feel like most of this fight can be won with the right fiber & some strategic construction choices. Dryness, on the other hand, takes a little fancier footwork (to use a particularly germane turn of phrase). Think of a soggy bath towel. If you are my neat, tidy husband, your wet bath towel is returned to the towel bar not long after you've finished drying off. Yet, even a few hours later (or, for those in moister climates, perhaps the next day), you can still feel residual moisture hovering inside the towel, even with air actively circulating around. (Worse still, if you are me, your towel tends to land in a dishevelled heap somewhere near the dresser & takes even longer to dry.)

Now imagine how much harder the dryness equation gets when we talk about socks, which are, more often than not, trying to dry off while inside shoes. This conundrum is what much of Dahlgren's construction seeks to remedy.

For example, a Dahlgren sock uses strips of merino/alpaca to absorb moisture around the foot, in tandem with rings of ECO-Dri to transfer that moisture up the sock & out of your shoe. The funky maze pattern maximizes the surface area of each section, boosting the wicking effect by 40% over a traditional build. Our intestines absorb nutrients using a similar principle-- they're long & snaky because that makes for a bigger surface than a more blobby organ like the stomach.

All in all, this extremely thoughtful construction process results in a superior performance sock that outshines even the highest quality straight-merino, which absorbs until it's saturated but no further. Good moisture control improves comfort, prevents blisters, & protects against frostbite. So, if you're ready to sink your tootsies into some gorgeous little portable Rube Goldberg machines for your feet (and if you don't recall what a Rube Goldberg machine is, or even if you secretly do, trust me & brush up with the video below), pay us a visit!

 

Here at Alpaca Direct, we carry a huge assortment of Dahlgren socks for every occasion: Casual Dress for the businessman on the go, the heavy duty Backpacking line for men or women, the fabulously popular Ultra Light Trail collection for men or women, & many, many more!

Pictured above: Dahlgren Sno Sports Socks for Men or Women. These & many more available at Alpaca Direct!

Project tutorial: Cristaria Shrug

Named for a pearl mussel that produces freshwater pearls, the Cristaria shrug is a quick, pretty knit shrug that complements formal summer ensembles or casual looks alike. Add beads or pearls for a piece that is truly your own! 

Materials:

• 100 g Cascade Ultra Pima or similar
• US 10 circular needles, 20˝ or longer
• About 25 freshwater pearls (optional)
• About 25 head pins (optional)

Stitch abbreviations:

• yo— yarn over
• k2tog— knit 2 stitches together

Directions &  Hints:

Cast on 108 stitches, leaving at least a 12˝ tail. This will seem longer than it needs to be, but don’t fret! Take a look at the picture to the right. Imagine taking your straight cast-on edge & bending it into the wavy bottom edge of the shrug. That’s why your finished piece won’t be anywhere near as wide as it seems now.

• Row 1: knit across
• Row 2: purl across

Here comes the exciting part: the lace row. This sequence of increases & decreases is what turns a fairly ordinary stitch pattern into something visually interesting (and, in this case, wavy!). During each repeat, you are going to decrease a total of 6 times (the k2tog stitches) and increase a total of 6 times (the yarn overs). So, even though you’re subtracting stitches in some places & adding them in others, your total stitch count at the end of each row should always be the same (108, to be precise).

• Row 3: k2tog 3 times, *k1, yo* 6 times, k2tog 3 times. Place stitch marker. Repeat across row 5 more times.

Phew! Take a step back & congratulate yourself— you just finished the tricky part & I bet it looks like a rat’s nest, doesn’t it? Just remember: you’re taking a wavy row & straightening it out onto your needle, so it really should look a bit confused.

• Row 4: knit across

And that’s really all there is to it! You’ll repeat those 4 rows about 14 more times, depending on how big around you’d like your armholes. To finish, bind off & break yarn, leaving at least a 12˝ tail.

Don't panic when your work-in-progress looks bunchy!

Diving in Deeper:

The lace row sure does have a lot of counting— wouldn’t it be a lot easier to use more markers?

A tempting proposition, no? Normally, I prefer to use markers like big red flags to remind me when it’s time to change stitches. In this pattern, though, the markers are smack dab in the middle of a bunch of k2togs! There is method to my madness (well, this time, at least…). This is an atypical lace pattern in that the increases are all bundled together & the decreases are all bundled together. A more regular (rectangular) pattern usually peppers them across the row in pairs. Because of this, if you plunk down markers willy-nilly, they will actually migrate across the row & mess you up! So, the short answer is that markers are only useful to a point on this pattern. Think of them more as error correction tools— if you end up with anything other than 18 stitches between markers, you know something has gone wrong in that section.

The “short answer?” That didn’t seem very short at all. Out of morbid curiosity, what was the long answer?

Plate tectonics!

Excuse me?

No, really! The stitch markers show you the center of a double-sided stitch “subduction” zone— basically a stitch gobbler. It’s like the stitch markers are hovering over very aggressive black holes that pull stitches in & make them disappear. Conversely, in the middle of each increase section (right after the 3rd yarn over, to be precise) is a “mid-ocean ridge” of stitches— a place where new stitches bubble up to the surface & spread out. If you placed a stitch marker at each of these spots,  you could imagine them hovering over tiny stitch factories, creating new stitches & pumping them outward. The whole row would look something like this:

Which, to me, looks a whole lot like this:

Wow, this is really getting out of hand. Anything else you’ve been dying to get off your chest?

Well, since you asked… The idea for how & where to use stitch markers (as a way to catch & isolate mistakes instead of to tell you when to change stitches) came from the mathematical basis for error-correcting code. Also, the function y(x) = 2.5 cos (2π x/13), with x & y in centimeters, describes each row of this pattern. Whee!

Finishing:

String a single freshwater pearl onto each of about 25 head pins. Trim pin ends & bend into loops. Attach pins at the bottom of the soft U-shaped rows of the center 3 columns of stitches (see picture), or use whatever arrangement strikes your fancy.

Use reserved yarn tails to attach corners of finished piece to create armholes. Weave in ends & trim.

Now throw it over a sundress & go put Audrey Hepburn to shame.

Ready to turn your screen off & start knitting?

Download Cristaria Shrug tutorial  for a printable version of this post, or

Download Cristaria Shrug pattern for a no-nonsense, 1-page printable pattern.

XOXOXOXO, Meg :)

This shrug was knitted with Cascade Yarns Ultra Pima in Heathered Pansy #3705.

© 2011 Meghan Bosanko

Brand Spanking New: Cascade Ultra Pima

May I begin my yarn store blogging career with a confession?

When our general manager, Roxanne, approached me about constructing our summer class schedule, I drove home with eyes wide as saucers, eyelashes fluttering uncontrollably & shoulders tensed up so far I believe I lost sight of my neck. I panicked. Three whole months of summer class projects, you say? By next week, you say?

You see, I, like many other local fiber fiends, had fallen prey to a most pernicious rumor: that, when all's said & done, there's only so much knitting one can do in the blistering heat of an Idaho summer. Brainstorming eight projects anyone might even feel compelled to knit this time of year felt like a task bordering on Herculean.

But the next day, as if the clouds parted and the angel choirs started to sing, appeared my yarn hero of the summer: a shipment of brand spanking new Cascade Ultra Pima, fresh off a mail truck I'm really about ready to canonize. Helping Kristin unpack that box of yarn felt more like unpacking a bottomless box of new ideas, shipped direct from a benevolent gaggle of inspiration sprites.

That's not to say I ended up making every summer sample from Ultra Pima-- actually, only one pima shrug made the cut. What turned out to be best about the pima, for me, was that it catalyzed this flood of ideas about warm weather knitting. Have you ever heard the saying that a single pebble in the right place can divert a whole river? Ultra Pima was my pebble!

Suddenly, the ideas started to flow. Headbands to wear at the Farmer's Market. Bright tie-dye colored beach totes. Something pretty to keep me warm when the wind is blowing off the lake. Crocheted creatures from my summer adventures as a child. And all I needed was a soft, cottony nudge in the right direction.

Ready for a nudge of your own? Alpaca Direct stocks 51 colorways of Cascade Ultra Pima, each one satiny smooth, light as a feather, and machine washable.