Gusset on top toe-up socks

Today I finished my very first own design. I've been searching for a pattern that featured a gusset on top of the foot, but the only ones I could find were written top-down. Gagh! So I wrote my own.

The yarn I used was Dibadu Funnies Smooth Merino in the colourway "Letzte Rose". Gauge is something you should figure out for yourself. I used 2,5mm (US 1,5) dpns, but you can use whatever you're comfortable with.

Basically, I used common toe-up elements: Judy's Magic Cast-On, Wedge Toe, stockinette on the foot, slip stitch heel, 2/2 ribbing on the leg and Jeny's Surprisingly Stretchy Cast-Off. Instructions for all of these techniques can be found elsewhere, so I won't bother describing them here.

The interesting part is the gusset on top of the foot. Basically it is like the 'normal' gusset: you start at the same length and you work the same amount of increases every other round. If you have knit socks before, you know the numbers, if not look them up! There are enough tables and charts around.

So here's the gusset:
Let's assume, that the beginning of the round is on the left side of the sock; the first stitch of the round would be the first stitch of the instep stitches. Place a marker in the very center of the instep. You can remove that marker after the gusset is finished.

Now we need a couple of parameters:
x = number of stitches used in the 'normal' rounds on the foot and leg
g = number of increases for the gusset
v = number of stitches between each increase and the marker; this number gets bigger with every increase; the starting value is x/4 -g; the bigger the starting value, the blunter the tip of the gusset

The numbers I used were x = 68, g = 14 and the starting value of v = 3 because I know that these numbers fit my feet. Adjust these numbers to your gauge or look them up in a table somewhere.

Round 1: Knit g stitches, make 1, knit v to marker, slip marker, knit v, make 1, knit g. Knit the sole stitches.
Round 2: Knit all of the stitches.

Repeat these two rounds until v = x/4 -1 (in my case 16) and you're done with the gusset.

A note about the pattern between the increases: 
I wrote instructions for plain stockinette. In the picture you can see, that I knit a 2/2 ribbing.  You can of course do whatever you want. To make the increases as invisible as possible, do a lifted increase and adjust it to your pattern.

Norwegian Purls

Honestly, is there anything as awesome as Norwegian Purls?

For every continental knitter like myself there could be no greater invention. Purls are notorious for being difficult, and chaotic, and bothersome. Changing the position of the working yarn ever so often is nigh on impossible. My left index finger is not nearly as flexible as it ought to be. I used to hate ribbing. 1/1 ribs especially. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth... gaaaagh!

And then I read 'Knitting without Tears' by the incomparable Elizabeth Zimmermann and I finally found out, why the purls were so difficult to work with in the next row: I've been twisting them all along! That was a huge discovery.

But nothing is so sweet as Norwegian Purls. The whole idea seems like an exercise in logic. Remember maths? Remember something like this? 3 + 4 = 4 + 3. It doesn't matter whether the 3 comes first or the 4, the result is the same. Just as 'yarn in front of the needle' is the same as 'needle behind the yarn'. Right? And the rest of the magic is just rotating the needle in a clockwise motion, thereby entering the stitch to purl, continue rotating on and on and on, until the yarn is caught, then change gears, down and out of the stitch (like a clever dog escaping his collar) and yanking the old stitch of the left needle. And that's about it.

Wanna see it in action? Norwegian Purls

The Safety Line

Ever wanted to try something new, awesome, incredibly exciting? Lots of colours, intricate lace patterns, rare yarn, new techniques? Well, I do! And if you're anything like me, you probably know from experience, that trying out new stuff quite often results in a lot of tears and frustration.

Why? Because it doesn't matter how well you know your gauge. If you try out lace for the first time, the fabric gets rather stretchy, so you'd better cast on a couple of stitches less. Knitting with more than one colour stranded? You'd better knit rather loosely, but be sure to cast on a couple of stitches more. But here is the 100 Mio. $ question: How many more (or less)? To find that out you would have to knit a gauge in the proper pattern. If you knit socks, you'd better do it in rounds, too. And if you're anything like me, you'd probably skip that part, because you want to get started with your project. Right now!

Maybe there are parts of your project, that you do not have to worry about, except for, let's say, a particular heel, which is an awesome fit, but rather difficult, because it involves a lot of counting. If you make a mistake there, you know what follows: FROGGING! There it is, the dreaded word: frogging. Tearing up a faulty part of ones work is annoying enough. But the process of picking the stitches up again, can be maddening. Twisted stitches and ladders. They can become trusty friends.

What to do, what to do... just imagine, if there was an easy way, and a cheap one, too, to 'save' the current state, try out the difficult part, and if it doesn't work out, you can just revert to the saved state and start again. And if it does work out, you can just continue. And maybe even have several 'safety points'? Wouldn't that be great?

Well, good news: there is such a thing: The Safety Line! A safety net that consists of a piece of waste yarn and a tapestry needle. But how does it work?

Well, simple really. The piece of waste yarn has to be long enough, so that it fits comfortably, even when stretching the fabric. So for a sock, maybe you'd better take a piece of yarn, that is twice the circumference of the foot. And it has to be of the same thickness as the yarn of your project, or better still, a bit thinner. And do not use a fluffy thing! The colour doesn't matter, since you will pull that thing back out, if you do not need it anymore.

If you have yarn and tapestry needle assembled, you are ready to start: First insert the needle into the first couple of stitches as if to knit:

Pull the yarn through and keep on doing that until all the current stitches do not just hang on their needle, but also the yarn. While threading the yarn through the stitches, do not take them off the needle!
And here is, what it looks like after working the difficult part:

The heel is knit, the yarn can be pulled out!
If you had made a mistake, all you would have to do, is to yank the needles out and frog as long as you can. Do not worry, as soon as you come to the safety yarn, you will be stopped! Then pick up the stitches again, but be careful not to divide the safety yarn!

Sooner or later, you will know the proper gauge. Maybe you hit it right the first time, maybe the second, maybe the tenth. But no matter how long it takes, the rest of the sock is safe.

Continental vs. That Throwing Thing

I am rather partial to continental knitting. That's the way I learned it from my granny all those years ago and promptly forgot until Summer 2009, when I suddenly got the notion into my head, that knitting might be cool.
Since my granny was not immediately available (she lives about 80km away), I bought a heap of knitting books the height of K2 and immediately got knitting. It didn't take me long to get the hang of it, being rather clever with my hands, and I soon advanced from a simple bag for my mobile to my first ever sock!

And that's where my addiction truly started. Naturally, like most addicted people, I couldn't get enough, and I proceeded to enhance my repository of techniques and patterns and books. So I shopped at amazon and I googled my fingers off. And that's where I first came into contact with the other kind of knitting: That Throwing Thing, or the English Method.

At first, I had trouble identifying what style I am knitting myself in , but a couple of minutes on youtube soon cleared it up. And I also got a better look at the throwing style. But I can honestly say, that I still do not understand how so many people (most of GB and the USA) could persist in using a technique that is so slow, prone to very loose tension, and so unneccessarily complicated as That Throwing Thing. Yes, you've read correctly: complicated!

The question Continental vs. English has been discussed before. At length. And one of the most featured arguments was and continues to be, that the English method is much simpler, easier to learn and therefore much better suited to beginners. I disagree. Strongly. Essentially, the knit stitch is a knit stitch. Whether you knit it in Continental or English, it always looks the same. To understand how such a stitch works, is totally independent from the knitting style. Whether you grasp the concept of how the stitches all hang together is more a matter of your intellect and dexterity and not whether you throw something or not.

In my opinion, That Throwing Thing is slow and messy, because to knit a stitch you have to:

Insert the tip of the right needle into the next stitch, change the working needle from one hand to the other, while taking care that the tip of the needle does not slip out of the stitch, find (and untangle) the working yarn, wrap it around the needle tip and push (or shove) the tip out of the stitch. After that, you have to tug the yarn a bit with your right hand to get some tension, change the working needle back to the right hand, only to almost instantly change it back to the other hand again. And so on...

The English style of knitting makes you spend most of the time playing musical chairs with the needles and organizing the yarn with too much movements and chaos and far too high a potential of losing needles, stitches and yarn.

Compare it with the Continental knit stitch:

Starting a row, you grab the needle with all the stitches to be worked on in your left hand, wrap the working yarn around your left index finger and take the other needle in your right hand. While knitting, you never let go of either needle or working yarn, so you only have to do this procedure once every row, after which you can keep the yarn wrapped around your finger and only have to change the needles.
The actual knit is produced by inserting the tip of the right needle into the next stitch and catching the working yarn with a quick twist of the right hand. After you caught the working yarn with the right needle, you can just yank the old stitch off the left needle, give a short pull with the left index finger to adjust the tension and shove the next stitch further to the tip of the left needle to be worked on (you can do this with your left thumb) all at the same time.

Since you never let go of either needle or working yarn, you do not have to waste time to organize or untangle anything and your movements are on a much smaller scale. This makes you fast, the steady tension of the yarn keeps the tension of the yarn... well... steady, and it also ensures that the neatness of the project overall is the same. The Continental Style is just one fluid sequence of tiny motions.

And what about purls? Yes, alright! The purl is not that different from the knit stitch when throwing, but it can be a real pain in the *** when knitting Continental. All I have to say on this subject is: google for ‘Norwegian Purl’. And that beats the English again.

In short: Knitting Continental gives you the freedom to think about your knitting, your pattern and the construction details, without being harassed by procedural stones in your road. Adjust the process to the workflow, not the workflow to the process!

Maybe it should also be noted, that most of the people, who detest one method, started to learn knitting in the other style. I count myself among those. Although it is curious, that there are (or at least appear to be) more people who change from English to Continental, than the other way around. And why do so many English knitters idolize Elizabeth Zimmermann? She was a Continental!

I have to be honest here, though. Sometimes I do knit in a mixed style. I do that, when I knit with two different colours (e.g. two yarns) at the same time. Essentially, I still knit continental, but when the pattern calls for the next colour, I drop the old yarn and wrap the other around my finger. This does require a lot of untangling and organizing and it does notably slow me down. Maybe, if I practised a bit more, I could use the two-yarns-wrapped-aound-the-left-index-finger method. But since I mainly knit with one yarn at the time, I do not feel the need right now to learn it.

And this is exactly the point: If you always use the same yarn, why not keep hold of it as long as you need it? Why do you have to throw it away so often? And is that why it is called The Throwing Method?