New two tone kilt hose!

[Patty Logan]

As anyone wore this new two tone kilt hose with a Black Watch kilt?
It would look so good with black flashes. If you have please provide pictures.

[OC Richard]

Yes, they are indeed made separately and stitched together. I had considered ripping out the seam and putting the pieces back together to shorten both the leg length and the cuff width. But that's tricky on a knitted item; you still need it to stretch when it's reassembled. So regular stitching like one would do on fabric won't work. It would require a joining technique specific to knitting...

Not knowing how to do it has kept me from separating & rejoining the cuffs on a pair of shooting-length hose that I accidentally purchased.

Perhaps there's a tutorial on YouTube...

[Tobus]

Not knowing how to do it has kept me from separating & rejoining the cuffs on a pair of shooting-length hose that I accidentally purchased.

Perhaps there's a tutorial on YouTube...

Sure, there are lots of videos on YouTube for joining or seaming ends of knitted items. But there are some issues with commercial kilt hose that will make it more complicated than what you see them doing in knitting video examples.

First, commercially-made kilt hose are done on a machine using very small 2-ply yarn or even 1-ply yarn. It's really more like fine thread rather than knitting yarn. It's much smaller than anything one could hand-make with knitting needles. So, at least for me, it's a challenge to even see the structure of their stitches, much less be able to work into them with a sewing needle.

Second, the yarn they use is much more elastic than what most hand-knitters are used to dealing with. This is why commercial hose get so much more stretch than hand-knits. HoC uses a yarn that, according to their website, is an 85% merino/acrylic blend, with 10% nylon and 5% lycra. This is much more elastic than pure wool or the simple wool/nylon blend that most hand-knitters use for socks, so it gets tricky trying to do a seam through the knit stitches on a very stretchy yarn. You'd need to use a yarn or thread that stretches the same as the parent yarn, or you'll get a tight restriction at the seam that won't stretch like the rest of the sock. And even if you do use a yarn with similar stretch, you have to get the joining tension just right. Too loose and it will be a sloppy seam. Too tight and you over-stretch the yarn. It's tricky enough with regular knitting yarn to get the right tension when joining (like when doing a Kitchener stitch); I'm not even sure I'd want to try it with a super-elastic yarn.

Third, hose cuffs are inside-out from the legs. Knitting has a "right side" and "wrong side". Generally speaking, at least for our purposes here, the knit stitches would show on the outside while the purl side faces inward and is non-visible when worn. But when joining, you'd need to join just as they did with the purl side of the cuff facing outward so that when it's folded over, the inside (knit side) now faces outward. Most videos you'll see on joining knitted items will be right-side to right-side. Since this would be right-side to wrong-side, it will affect how you work the yarn through the stitches, since you'll be dealing with knit stitches on one piece and purl bumps on the other. It can be done, but can get confusing real quickly if you're not familiar with the way knit stitches work.

Fourth, their kilt hose have ribbing on the legs and then the tops are worked in a different stitch pattern. Some are plain, some have cable stitches, etc. If you were really trying to join them with a knitting method, you'd need to alter the way you work the thread into the stitches depending on the pattern of their stitches and how they match up. So at any point on the join, you could be trying to work a knit stitch to a knit stitch, or a knit stitch to a purl stitch, or a purl stitch to a purl stitch. And I'm not even sure if the stitch count is the same on the leg and the cuff where they join, so that would need to be checked first before trying to do a one-to-one join on each stitch.

Fifth, as I recall from looking at their existing seam, I don't think they did anything special to join them through the parent stitches. These really just look like they were machine-sewn together on a regular sewing machine. But again it's very tiny and difficult to see their joining stitches. The ends of the two pieces that are joined may not be truly bound off, and may just be raw edges with loose ends that are kept from unraveling by their machine-stitched seam. Once you undo the seam, if the leg and cuff don't have their edges bound off, they can start to unravel or work loose as you try to work a new yarn through the stitches. I'm guessing at this point, because I haven't actually had the courage to undo their seam to find out. So re-joining the pieces on a sewing machine may be the best option rather than using a knitter's technique. But again, you'd have to use an appropriate thread and be careful to make the pieces match right while still getting the stretch needed. I've never had good luck trying to sew stretchy material on a sewing machine. I end up with an uneven mess that has ripples and bunches and unintended tucks at the seam.

Of course, it could be really easy and simple to joing them, and I'm just overthinking it. I do that sometimes.