Feels like forever, but it has only been days. I’m referring to my blog post frequency not a country western song. It is time to re surface, come up for air. Days passed where I saw no further than my mailbox. I’ve gotten my dyeing fix. The weather cleared, the skeins have dried. Now to photograph and post. If today goes as planned, I’ll have all the new sock yarn colors up online.
My toe up socks… I need some help here. My instep is very high. This hasn’t been an issue with most patterns. Jaywalker was an exception, I had to rip them out and admit that they will not ever stretch enough to go over my heel. I’ve just encountered the same problem with my toe up socks. For the past week, the dandelion sock has been sitting, waiting, for me to decide what to do. After turning the heel, and trying it on, I have ripped it back to the pre-heel stage. It was too tight. The fabric was stretched to the limit over my instep. The foot is fine and plenty long. I don’t want the foot any wider. Any ideas?
I forgot to mention the pattern. I was using Wendy’s gusset toe up pattern. It is very easy to follow. I wonder if I should increase the gusset stitches..?
13 responses to “help me on the toe ups..”
Lucy Neatby does the heel over 60% of the stitches. That might help. I’m not a fan of toe ups and short row heels for that very reason…high instep. You can always add more rows to a normal heel but toe ups…not so easy.
I also have a high instep and before I learned to knit gussets to short row heel socks, I used to dislike them. I’ve described the gussets and wrote a pattern when we were doing Cloverleaf Socks at Six Sox Knitalong. The pattern is in my archives, scroll to the bottom of the page: http://2cinquefoils.net/citikas/blog/archive/2004_06_01_citikas_archive.html I hope this helps you.
Toe-up socks with a gusset and flap heel are great. I don’t care for short row heels. Check out my pattern if you’d like:
http://cheryknits.typepad.com/knit/files/2sox2circs_instructions.pdf
Starting the gusset earlier and thus making more gusset stitches should help. I haven’t tried that pattern yet but my usual toe up sock uses a heel similar to that in Knitty’s windershins pattern. Gusset and flap that look and act just like a ‘normal’ top down sock.
Fabulous sock yarn colors! Sorry I can’t help out with the sock dilemma- never done a toe up sock.
I cannot help with your sock question. But I can say that those are gorgeous sock yarns.
Sorry, I’m a committed top-down socker. 😉 But can you change the percentage of stitches used for the heel to some other percentage that suits your own foot better? It’s easy enough to do this top-down (just widen or narrow the heel flap), so it seems like you should be able to do the same thing working toe-up.
I have a high instep too. I put up a tutorial of sorts for a toe up heel flap and it fits my high instep very nicely.
http://mimknits.com/wordpress/?p=86
While I can’t help with the toe-up, I have been wondering what happened with the yellow socks. I was quite taken with the little yellow flowers in the green lines and was hoping that when it was done you would tell us how you made the little flowers. Good luck!
All this does not encourage me to learn the toe up thing. If everyone has weird feet, then can weird feet then be defined as normal feet?
High arch here–start the gussets earlier, you want to have about the same number of gusset stitches as you would pick up on the edge of the flap for a top-down heel. I always make the flap a bit longer than called for on top-down socks, I’m knitting a pair of toe-up socks right now and making notes because I always have to rip and redo to get the foot long enough.
I wear size 10 shoes, I start the gusset at 6-1/4″, increase by 12 stitches on each side and begin the heel at 8.5″. You’ll have to play a bit, I have long narrow feet & high arches. Can’t wear the common short row heels at all.
Just looked at Wendy’s pattern–I start the gusset much sooner- 3-3/4″ short of total length!
Hi there, love your blog. I am quite taken with your dandelion sock. What pattern did you use? It is very sweet. Thank you Chery