Monday, July 30, 2012

Sizing a sock

In spite of being a bit frantic to figure out how I can possibly finish a pair of twined mitts before the Olympics end (we'll talk about that later this week) I did have to take a break on Saturday to work on Bob's socks.


Bob lives about 5 hours away from me, which - even though he is pretty tall - is a long way to stretch out a leg so as to let even the most dedicated knitter measure out a sock in progress.  So I gotta grab my chances if I'm going to come up with something that will fit him.  Bob was at the cottage this weekend, and that meant I was knitting his socks.  Or rather, looking at his feet.

(I'd just like to say that I've known Bob for over 45 years, and somehow he managed to get away with spending most of our childhood summers barefoot, so it's not like I've never seen his feet before.  Still.  Not something I anticipated doing so much of back in January when I was dreaming of cottage life.)

Turns out, my suspicions from two years ago when Bob was letting me put Robert's socks-in-progress on him to test for length were justified: Bob has... erm... distinctive feet.


See where that arrow is pointing?  See how the heel flap and the gusset line don't quite line up?  That's because I've had to add in eight stitches for the foot that I didn't need in the leg.

And I'm not using tiny needles or laceweight either so you can just make a guess there at what that measures up to.

Can you imagine what would happen if I had tried to knit these for a surprise?  They'd look gorgeous as he pulled them out of the gift bag, and they'd feel amazing in his hand as he reached to try them out, and then... they wouldn't go on.  At all.  And I'd be stuck with a knit that took hours and hours to be entirely unusable.  (except that they'd probably fit Robert.)   So cruel, on all counts.

Anyhoo - what I did here was measure Bob's foot and his lower calf to determine the difference in measurement, then calculated how many stitches were missing to make that up.  'Eight' made things easy - I knit two extra rows in the heel flap so I could pick up an extra stitch there, and then I slipped that new stitch plus another stealth one to the needles for the top of the foot.  I'll stop decreasing for the gusset when I have two more stitches on each of the remaining needles than I had for the leg...

... and then it's just knit knit knit to the toe.

Which will hopefully not take long because there is another sock to do too and a pair of mitts that really want to be all finished and decorous in - what, 13 days from now?

CRIMiny.

More tomorrow - happy knitting today!

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