My Hippy Crunchy socks are not going well at all. I ripped out the short row heel and knit a heel flap instead. Everything was going along swimmingly at KnitSmiths, until I tried the sock on and realized that I still had a bunch of stitches to decrease, and the edge of the pattern was already super close to the bottom of my foot:

The instep is over 40 stitches, and I think the foot is supposed to be 70 stitches total (I don’t have the pattern in front of me so I’m not entirely sure). While perhaps the total number makes sense due to the stretchiness of the pattern (so you’d need more stitches than the cuff to accommodate the stockinette), it still leaves me with a pattern that’s dangerously close to the bottom of the foot. The solution that Stariel helped me come up with at KnitSmiths was to rip out back to the heel, only do three pattern repeats instead of four (so over 28 stitches instead of 40), skip the increases before the heel, and go from there. I could just decrease in the gusset until it fits – not sure what the total number for my somewhat narrow foot would be with this pattern. This is a brilliant plan, except for one thing I just thought of yesterday. The way the pattern is laid out, there is kind of a seam in the back of the sock of four stitches. It turns out that this is kind of unnecessary – this particular lace pattern in the round doesn’t need the +4 in the repeat (just if you’re knitting it flat) so had I realized that earlier, I would have omitted those four stitches before knitting the entire cuff. Now, since I only want to do three repeats over the instep, I have a problem of symmetry – there’s no way for me to do those three repeats on the instep and leave the seam in the back, and no way to knit two full repeats and two half repeats and have them look nice. So, my options are:

1) Rotate the seam to the inside of the leg before knitting the heel flap, remember to do this in the opposite direction for the second sock. I would also knit the heel on a US 1.5 instead of a 1 – I had to knit a ton of rows to get the length, and therefore pick up a lot of stitches, which is just more to decrease at a faster rate (thus my somewhat steep gusset slope).

2) Rip out the whole sucker and do the cuff without those extra four stitches (cuff is a little bit loose, so should be fine), knit the heel flap with US 1.5s.

3) Just keep going with it and if the pattern really does hit me badly (I think I have about 8 more stitches to decrease), make these house socks.

Thoughts?

In good news, when I was initially complaining about my needle choices for my Hippy Crunchy socks, Jillian found The Knitter’s Underground for me, a store that actually carries Inox Express 40″ circulars in a US 1! I was super excited about them (and ordered them immediately). I got a little bit of a scare at KnitSmiths, when Stariel, the sock knitting machine, mentioned that apparently Inox Express has both a 1.5 and a 1 that they call a 1, and this site doesn’t specify the mm measurement. I got a little nervous, but they came in the mail yesterday.

Real, US 1 needles (2.25 mm). I even sized it just to make sure. So at least while I struggle with this sock pattern, I can stop using the DPNs I’m not especially fond of.

Tweet This Post