Last night I was texting with my friend Shelley about making socks, and then Heather left a comment on yesterday's post about getting started with socks, so I am going to write a post about knitting socks.
Knitting socks = the best! They are such happy little projects: portable, colorful, varied, and easy to give to your knitworthy friends and loved ones, because just about everybody needs socks.
Choose good yarn -- I love the Schoppel sock yarns myself. You want mostly superwash wool mixed with something tougher for durability, like 25% nylon. Good sock yarn is more expensive than you might expect it to be, because a lot of us are used to buying socks at Target. You are going to spend a lot of hours staring at this sock yarn as it runs through your fingers, so tell yourself that the price per hour of enjoyment is low, not that the price per sock is high.
I recommend knitting socks on two circular needles, or using the magic loop technique on one circular needle with a 40-inch cable. YouTube will show you how to get started with either of those techniques for knitting in the round if you haven't tried them yet. You can also use double-points, but they make your project less portable and you are going to find yourself grumbling about chasing after the one that rolled under the coffee table again. Start with US size 2, which is 2.75mm in non-US locales.
Top-down socks are easier to start with than toe-up socks (or any of the weirder offerings, like this goofy pattern that tells you to start in the middle). Use a long-tail cast-on to set yourself up for working 64 stitches in the round. Make yourself a nice K2P2 cuff. I like to rib all the way down my sock leg to minimize sag, but you can switch over to stockinette after an inch of ribbing if it's easier for you to find a groove with stockinette.
When your sock leg is the length you want it to be, you'll switch for a bit from knitting in the round to knitting back and forth. I found this Wayback Machine link that's very much like my go-to pattern for top-down socks. It will walk you through the heel flap, heel turn, and gusset. Once you're back to 64 stitches, you just cruise down the foot in happy rounds of stockinette until you reach the toe-zone.
Heather asked specifically about socks for Fred Flintstone, and LO, I have a post in my archives called Fred Flintstone's New Socks! (What are the odds? I wonder if I am the internet's leading Fred Flintstone sock blogger in addition to being the internet's leading kraken/bunyip blogger?) Most sock patterns tell you to taper the toe at a 45-degree angle for 1.5-2 inches before grafting the front and back together, but you can just do fewer rounds of toe decreases to get a squarer sock. Heather, you might think about grafting your first toe in a contrasting color so it's easy to unpick it if you want to take another crack at the toe shaping.
If you think you want to try toe-up socks, which are my default these days, here's a post with my sock recipe. The beginning is more fiddly and there's more math and/or guessing involved in deciding when to start the gusset increases, so I suggest top-down for your first pair or two.
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