Summer Sock KAL 2b: Cuff Down

Don’t miss the Summer Sock KAL with projects from Stories In Stitches 3!

More About Heels and Toes

So, what happens after you knit the heel?

You started your sock working in the round, then you knit the heel back and forth. When you’re done you need to get back to working in the round again.

If you did a short row heel, that’s easy! You just knit all the way around on all of the stitches and you’re back to the tube for the foot. Because the short row heel doesn’t have a heel flap, it doesn’t create an awkward shape that blocks you from going all the way around.

With a heel flap, after you turn the heel, you’ll notice that you have two sets of stitches that are separated by the rest of the heel, with the sides of the heel sitting there in between the two groups of live stitches. What you have to do is pick up and knit stitches on both sides of the heel flap. Only then will you have stitches that are all next to each other ready to be made into a tube again.

 

There’s one other surprise that happens, and that is you have more stitches than you started with! Even though after you turn the heel, you don’t have as many stitches as you did at the beginning of the heel, after you pick up the stitches on the sides of the flap, you will have more than you started with. So you have to decrease at both sides of the foot until you are back to your original number. This is called gusset shaping (or sometimes you may see it called instep shaping). Notice that this happens in both of the flap/turn heels below which are worked with different stitches on the flap and different shaping in the turn.

After that, the rest of the sock is easy peasy because you knit straight for the foot and then decrease for the toe (or work a short row toe exactly like the short row heel). The basic formula for decreasing on a toe is to begin when you get just past that last knuckle on the big toe and then decrease 4 stitches every other round until 1/2 of the stitches are used up, and then decrease every round till you have somewhere between 4 and 16 sts left.

• If the decreases are made at the side edges of the foot, you decrease down to about 16 sts and then graft the toe with Kithchener stitch.
• If the decrease are made spread evenly around the foot, you decrease down to 4-8 sts and then gather them in as at the top of a hat or on a mitten tip.

 

There’s one more kind of heel you can do, which is called a afterthought heel (or sometimes a peasant heel) and it is made after the sock is complete. You leave a hole in the knitting, either by knitting the heel stitches with scrap yarn and removing it later or by putting the heel stitches on hold and doing a provisional cast on above the opening.

Then you pick up those stitches later and work them just like the wedge toe (bottom example in the photo above).

 

Don’t miss the Summer Sock KAL with projects from Stories In Stitches 3!