Zig Zag Socks : Update - 24 September 2024

One of my friends loved the yarn colour and asked me to make him a pair of socks. As I was knitting the second sock anyway I said if the finished sock fitted okay he could have this pair (it saves me thinking of birthday presents). He was keen but asked if the cuff could be made about an inch or 2.5 cm longer.

That was no problem : I kept knitting the second sock cuff to an inch longer. I finished the second sock but I still had to lengthen the cuff of the first sock as shown below.

The problem was not the lengthening but it was the type of cast on I used at the beginning. You might recall I used the alternating cast on method. This method was new to me and though it was time consuming it looked really neat as it gave a rounded edge to the cast on row.

For the same reason that it was so rounded I had no idea how to unpick it to lengthen it. I initially decided to just pick up the stitches I could see.

Four ply yarn is very thin; you need 2.5mm needles to to knit it to create the right type of sock fabric. Picking up small and unclear stitches was very hard. Luckily I had a thin crochet hook and that made the job bearable. I picked up the 64 stitches but noticed that there was a clear ridge. I knitted the 7 to 8 rows needed to reach the 2.5cm and decided it didn’t look or feel right.

There was one option left and that was totally unpicking, cutting and basically get rid of the previous nice cast on edge. I did that but it was very time consuming and difficult to see what I was doing.

_{Only about 16 more stitches left to finish.}

Although this dealt with the ridge it still wasn’t right, there was no correlation in the stitches. The purl stitches and knit stitches were very odd; it was as if they didn't fit in. As usual I went searching for answers on You Tube but it was hard to get exactly what I wanted to know. The video below shows you what I should have done :

_{The principle should be the same}

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I shouldn’t have just unravelled from the edge, I should have taken out the whole cuff. At least I now know how to do it but at the time I kept going and knitted the missing inch. Also the video I linked to above shows the process using very thick yarn in a light colour. I can only imagine how difficult it would be to try and do that process in a piece of knitting like the sock. I've learnt a lot knitting this pair of socks. I now understand the importance of planning in advance and sticking to that plan as you cannot really change direction easily half way.

Thank you for reading !