Monday, July 09, 2012

The joy of an after thought heel

I love hand knitted socks (well duh) and they make perfect travel knitting. Using an after thought heel makes them an even better travel project because you just knit a tube with no shaping other than the toe.

 A pair of completed socks - all bar the heels. The green yarn shows where the heels will go.

 Use a circular needle to pick up the stitches either side of the green yarn - in this case there were 32 stitches each side.
 Remove the green yarn (the stitches are held safe on your needle cables). You can do this one stitch at a time using something like a large darning needle or.....
you can be an impatient little bunny like me and cut those fookers out! Remove all the green yarn scraps and then join your yarn and knit the live sock stitches back in the round. (Some stitches might be twisted so either right them or knit them  through the back of the loop.)

I tend to pick up 4 extra stitches (one for each needle tip) which helps close any gaps which might occur, so at the end of the first round I go from 64 stitches to 68 stitches.
I work my after thought heel in the same manner as I work the toe - doing one extra decrease round to loose those extra 4 stitches. I find for depth and width of the heel cup that decreasing from 32 stitches to 16 stitches per needle is just about right.

So simple, so neat and quick too.

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