Holiday Rick-rack Mini-sock Free Needlepoint

Updated: July 31, 2018
Bright with traditional colors and using a classic, one-patch quilt pattern, the Holiday Rick-rack Mini-sock will only take an evening or two to stitch and will create a lovely addition to your Christmas decor.

During the 1930’s many people made quilts from feedsacks using a single patch. It was a very thrifty way to use up feedsacks and scraps of fabric. Along with hexagonal shapes, half-square triangles, and squares, equilateral triangles were popular for this.

The combination of alternating triangles reminded me of rick-rack and I thought stitching it in an overdyed thread would make it more festive.

The Holiday Rick-rack Mini-sock takes advantage of the fact that rick-rack trim looks like two rows of triangles back-to-back. This was a popular Depression pattern, not only because it was thrifty, but because rick-rack trim was a popular and inexpensive trim on household linens and clothing.

If you don’t want to use a holiday theme, pick an overdye you like. Make the rick-rack from it and choose a coordinating background color. It can be made so quickly, you can easily make a bunch.

Material List

Cream or white metallic with wool or silk, such as Planet Earth Opal (model uses Wool Crepe from Amy’s)
1 skein Holiday Watercolours
8×10 piece 18-mesh white mono canvas

If you don’t want a cream background, pick a metallic and silk thread in a very light version of a color in your overdye.

If you plan on using Silk Lame as your background thread, choose the size for 13-mesh; straight stitches require thicker threads in order to cover properly.

Stitching the Canvas

Using a permanent non-xylene marker (like Pigma microns or SCA-UF markers) trace the outline of the mini-sock onto your canvas, below. Do not trace the internal lines, just use the outline. Click for the fill-size pattern.

The entire stocking is stitched in Trianglepoint compound triangles. You can vary the size of these triangles by varying the number of stitches in them. The picture below shows the different sizes of triangles.

Begin stitching in the top center of the outline with the top of a Watercolours triangle, diagrammed below. Make one of these triangles and fill out the row on either side with more of the Watercolours triangles.

Fill up the spaces with triangles in the background thread. This will complete the top row.

The second row is essentially and upside down version of the top row. The colored triangles are centered under the longest stitch of the background triangles. This is what creates the rick-rack effect.

Continue stitching in this manner until the outline is filled. I stitched the Watercolours triangles first for each pair of rows and then filled in the background.

Making the Pattern Larger

If you want to make this pattern on a larger scale, you must continue to have large triangles made up of only four small triangles (bottom row of three triangles). Thus to increase the size of the triangles, you must make each individual small triangle larger. To do this increase the number of stitches (and their length) in each small triangle. These triangles as 2-4-6-4-2. Larger triangles could be 2-4-6-8-6-4-2 or 2-4-6-8-10-8-6-4-2.