Garter Ties

Hello!

I finally got around to taking a few pictures of several of the things I've been working on as of late.

 Garter ties, or garters for short are a old time method of keeping knee length socks in place, before the days of elastic. Specifically, I made mine for my kilt hose. Most folks nowadays use short strips of elastic with decorative fabric, called flashes,  to keep there kilt hose up. The problem with these little guys is that they have a tendency to be uncomfortable.

Flashes:

I thought it would be fun, and more satisfying to make my own traditional garter ties. It was easy, I did a simple three strand braid with yarn until I had six lengths of three strand braid, for a grand total of eighteen pieces of yarn. Once I had my six lengths done, I did a six strand flat braid to create the finished product.

This shot shows the flat braid well.

I stitched the ends up with thread that matchs the respective yarn color.

The garter ties are very easy to fasten, I just wrap mine around my calf, tie a overhand knot and then tuck the two ends back over the knot.

The final product, with the hose cuff turned down

Word 'O' the day

I, being interested in words, thought it would be fun to occasionally put up a word of the day. It may be common, obsolete, new or ancient, it could even be in another language. Please feel free to join in if you find a particularly fascinating word. So, here it is!

                          Welkin:
Meaning sky, heaven, the firmament. 


"We don’t use this much nowadays — dictionaries usually tag it as archaic or literary — except in the set phrase make the welkin ring, meaning to make a very loud sound. What supposedly rings in this situation is the vault of heaven, the bowl of the sky. In older cosmology this was thought to be one of a set of real crystal spheres that enclosed the Earth, to which the planets and stars were attached, so it would have been capable of ringing like a bell if you made enough noise. The word comes from the Old English wolcen, a cloud, related to the Dutch wolk and German Wolke. Very early on, for example in the epic poem Beowulf of about the eighth century AD, the phrase under wolcen meant under the sky or under heaven (the bard used the plural,wolcnum, but it’s the same word). Ever since, it has had a strong literary or poetic connection. It appears often in Shakespeare and also in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: “This day in mirth and revel to dispend, / Till on the welkin shone the starres bright”. In 1739, a book with the title Hymns and Sacred Poems introduced one for Christmas written by Charles Wesley that began: “Hark! how all the welkin rings, / Glory to the King of kings”. If that seems a little familiar, it is because 15 years later it reappeared as “Hark! the herald-angels sing / Glory to the new born king”."
- World Wide Words

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