What I have been able to do, as the weather has been so gorgeous, is to grab my car-knitting socks (for long traffic lights and boredom emergencies and waiting in line at the Post Office, not for while I'm driving. Jeez) and sit on the grass near one of the man-made lakes that the Canada geese favour, and knit at lunch-time.
Socks will get done a lot quicker than traffic lights only.
This was something of an experiment, which is conceptually a success, though the implementation, while not technically a failure (the socks are wearable, after all), could certainly be improved upon.
They are cuff-down socks in which the stitches are divided into four equal groups, each separated by a little cable, and the heel shaping (it's not a flap) is achieved by increasing on either side of the centre back cable until the stitch count is up by 50% (pretty standard), and then turning the heel in the usual way (short-rowing and decreasing to eat up heel stitches). Because there was no flap as such, the extra stitches were decreased away by continuing to short-row until the instep and sole each had half of the original number of stitches.
On the first sock I continued the side cables at the border between sole and instep; by the second sock I was tired of twisted stitches so I didn't.
On the first sock I worked the heel stitches by knitting through the back loop to twist them and make the fabric a little sturdier, whereas on the second sock I worked the standard heel stitch, which in retrospect was a bad choice, due to lengthwise draw-in which distorted the overall shape slightly. If one couldn't conceive of socks without a slip-stitch heel, some short-rows to equalise the discrepancy between instep and heel row gauges would be in order.
I also turned the heel a little sharply on both socks (even though I thought I was making the second heel rounder) which made the heels slightly pointy.
On the sole of the second sock I knitted every other row through the back loop of the stitches, which is really pretty in this yarn, and makes for more of an arch-hugging fit, though I'm not really in much of a position to address that, as I don't exactly have high arches. But still.
To shape the toes, I decreased on either side of the four-stitch cables (or non-cables in the case of the second sock) until there were about an inch of stitches between each cable, and then worked the cable across the toe, eating up those last stitches, and grafting only four stitches. A cable would have been a good choice for both socks, as the texture adds a certain amount of reinforcement.
I might repeat the general idea sometime, but first, I need to make socks out of hexagons.
1 comment:
Awesome socks! Although I have tried my hand at knitting and crocheting I never tried socks (and really don't plan to cuz well...I suck at it) I do appreciate all the work you put into them and it is great that they are wearable(none of mine were!) Thanks for sharing!
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