First, just a few quick notes about the Summer of Socks 2007.

Oh. My. God. I’m so excited! The response so far has been amazing! I knew when Wendy came on board (thanks for the shout out Wendy!) this was going to be big. Very big. There is still plenty of time to sign up, but you might want to do it sooner than later. If this thing gets out of hand, I may have to close it sooner than expected!

The sponsorships keep coming in which is making the prize pool very interesting (the more the merrier!). I’ll be putting up a page with more descriptions of the prizes donated so far sometime after Maryland. If there is anyone out there that does hand-made stitch markers that would like to be a sponsor, please contact me [Jessica (at) zarzuelaknitsandcrochets (dot) com]! I think stitch markers would be great prizes for the Weekly Link contests.

Speaking of socks, I’ve finally gotten to take some better pictures of how my argyle socks are constructed. There seemed to be some confusion last time, so I hope this clears it up for all of you.

The cuff is knit flat because of the colorwork. It really isn’t possible to do argyle intarsia in the round unless you take out the single lines that criss-cross the diamond pattern and duplicate stitch them on later. I didn’t really want to do that, so I went with the flat cuff knitting. When the cuff is finished, this particular pattern has one diamond continue onto the instep. In order to do this and still have the stitches for the heel be in the right place, some edge stitches on the flat cuff are put on holders while the final diamond is knit. The instep stitches are then placed on holders in preparation for knitting the heel flap and gussets. Here’s the completed colorwork:

After the colorwork is complete, the yarn is broken and the cuff is folded over to form a tube. The stitches on the holders are picked back up, the yarn is rejoined and the heel flap is knit from them. The heel is then turned as usual. This picture shows the heel stitches as they are being knit for the heel flap:

And here is the completed heel flap, with the heel already turned, looking at the wrong side:

Next, the yarn is broken again and stitches are picked up along the sides of the heel flap to knit the gussets. This is pretty much the same as normal construction, but you don’t have the instep stitches on the needles just yet. The gussets are knit back and forth in the flat as this part of the sock has to be the right length to match up with the instep portion that has already been knit. Here’s the view of the completed gusset looking at it from the bottom of the sock:

Here’s another view of the gussets from the side, in line with the instep:

From there it is just a matter of picking up the stitches of the instep and knitting the rest of the foot! Piece of cake right? Questions? Ask away! Finished object post… well… maybe before Maryland, maybe after!

Related posts:

1. Anyone have an ark?
2. Warning! Knitting blue socks causes pregnancy!

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 3rd, 2007 at 7:26 am and is filed under argyle socks, Summer of Socks 2007. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.