New Yarns Resolution - Knitting socks

 

It's almost the end of January and my list of New Yarns Resolutions is coming to an end as well. I'm on the final one that I set myself at the start of January, to learn how to knit socks. 

Socks are definitely something we take for granted but once you start trying to work out how to knit them, you realise how cleverly constructed the average sock actually is. It starts with a tube, it sort of turns into a curve, then it works its way down to your toes at an angle from where it started out. 

In crochet, I could probably work out how to do most of that as I find 'sculptural' yarn work so much easier in crochet. 

But in knitting there's a lot of things to work out there, and probably the hardest part is getting around the heel and getting something that doesn't look like a monster!

I started out on double pointed needles. Four with a working needle, which is all new to me (another thing I wanted to cross off my New Year / New Yarn list was working on DPNs, and I now love them a little TOO much and want to use them for everything!)

So casting 40 stitches onto four needles (nice and easy to divide evenly) I started with a 1-1 rib cuff before working in stockinette stitch for the remainder of the sock 'cuff'. 

Then the heel turn. The dreaded heel turn. People had warned me. "You FOOL!" they said. "You don't know what you're letting yourself in for!" but following a tutorial gave me some idea of how to achieve this tricky turn. It's like knitting a tiny little cup shape for your heel before somehow marrying that cup shape to the rest of the sock body. 

And that involved picking up stitches, something I'd never done before and didn't do very well this time either.

The work in progress (I haven't got as far as the toe yet, this was killing my hands as it was, socks are surprisingly time consuming!)

You can see here that I got the heel shaping worked out OK but stuffed up the bit where I was reducing stitches from re-joining the heel to the instep and to the 'gusset' of the sock (the underbelly). Reducing too fast left me with the weird ball-sack bit at the back of the sock so that'll serve me right not reducing the stitch count for the continuation of in the round knitting around the instep / toe bit. 

The other bit I stuffed up on was somehow purling rows between the sock heel and the rest of the body which resulted in this weird line of purl stitches before I realised I was working in the wrong direction and on the wrong side and correcting myself. 

Lesson learned though, and for a first attempt at that dreaded heel turn I think I actually did OK and understood what was required. I definitely need to get better at picking up stitches, and need to work out how to reduce stitch counts more gradually, but hey, it's looking distinctly sock like, right? I can definitely do this but maaan alive how on earth do people do this for pleasure, and do TWO of them :D