The toe:
1. Hold 2 needles together and twirl the yarn in a figure of 8 around the needles till you have 4 loops per needle. The tail end must come to the top and the part attached to the yarn is underneath.
2. Knit the 4sts on needle 1, knit the 4sts on needle 2, knit the 4sts on needle 1, knit the 4sts on needle 2.
3. Knit the 4sts on needle 1 to get to the side with the tail. The tail will from now on serve as a marker to show you the top and front of the sock. Now you increase between the needles. You insert the needle underneath the last stitch of the bottom needle. Make sure there is a loop between the bottom needle and the 3rd needle otherwise the st will not knit. If you find problems knitting the stitch, look carefully and make sure the needle is inside a stitch with yarn basically all the way around the needle. Knit this stitch.
4. Now insert the needle into the st below the top needle. Also make sure there is a loop between the top needle and the 3rd needle otherwise you will find the stitch does not want to knit. Then knit the st. Knit the 4sts on the top needle. Increase in the same way in the gap between the top and bottom needles at the back end. Knit the 4sts on the bottom needle. I will renumber the needles now. Needle 1 has the 2 sts where the tail is hanging from between them. Needle 2 has 4sts. Needle 3 has 2sts and Needle 4 has 4 sts. Knit 1 round.
Increase on both sides of needles 1 and 3. Knit 1 round. You will now have 4sts on each needle.
5. Here I am trying to show where the needle is inserted for the new stitch. You insert it into the st below the previous needle or needle 4. Knit this st and the 4sts on needle 1.
6. Now insert needle 1 into the sts I'm trying to point out here - the stitch below the first on on needle 2. Knit this onto needle 1 = 6sts on needle 1. Knit the 4 on needle 2. Do the increasing on needle 3 to have 6sts on it. Knit the 4 sts on needle 4. Knit 1 round.
Continue increasing every second row till you have 10 + 4 + 10 + 4 stitches on your needles.
7. Rearrange your stitches. Put half of needle 1 and half of needle 4 together. Put half of needle 1 and half of needle 2 together. Put half of needle 3 and half of needle 2 together. Put half of needle 3 and half of needle 4 together. It should look like the photo above and you will have 7sts per needle. If you change colour, add it to the side where you will knit the 2 front halves first. It acts as a marker to show you the beginning of your rows from here on.
The foot:
Here you knit straight up and can do patterning and change colours and have fun. If you knit for someone specific, you can keep putting the sock on his/her foot to see how long you want the footpart. Generally the footpart goes to where the heel starts. I would advise you to make notes of how many sts and how many rows you knit for more or less what size foot. This is just my guess as the sock is for Cucu and he/she is still hiding away inside mom's tummy. I knitted for this sock 18 rows.
Now it is time to mark the heel. Take a different colour yarn of more or less the same thickness or maybe a little thicker and which is fairly smooth in texture. I have a very cheap and nasty yarn in a box in S.A. which works very well here. You can see the creamy line on the photo below. If you look towards the toe, you'll see the marker tail yarn is on the other side where the front of the sock is.
The leg:
Here you can also do as you please with colour, patterns, textures, different yarns, furry yarns and length. I knitted up 10 rows. This is also a nice section for a bit of hand embroidery like flowers. This is a really good spot for flowers.
The cuff:
This area is also a nice playground. You don't always have to knit rib. I did reverse stocking stitch here which makes the cuff curl over a bit. You can switch to crochet hooks and crochet a little lacy border or a picot border.
Casting off is not the usual way as it makes for a non-stretch top piece and then you cannot get the sock onto you foot. Knit 2sts, knit them together, knit 1st, knit the 2 together. It gives a very elastic edge.
The heel:
Now we get back to the heel. Carefully and with your reading glasses for definite now, pick up a loop of each stitch below the waste yarn. You should have 14sts. Now you pick up above the waste yarn. If you start picking up the so called right leg of a stitch, then do the same with the rest of the stitches in that row. You should have 14 + 14 stitches.
Now you can unpick the waste yarn and you will have the gap for the heel.
When you start picking up sts, let the yarn tail hang out where you can see it. It will serve as a marker to see where you started the next row. Pick up a stitch from next to the stitches on the needle as you can see in the photo above. It somehow firms up the corners a little. Try it for one pair and leave it for another and see what you prefer. Sometimes I forget to do it. So what you do now, is to pick up a stitch and knit 7sts onto needle 1. Take another needle, needle 2, knit the next 7 sts, pick up a stitch in the corner. Take needle 3, pick up a stitch in the same corner, but from another stitch, knit 7 stitches. Now knit with needle 4, the last 7 sts and pick up a stitch in the corner.
You now have 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 stitches. You will decrease every second row for this sock, but for bigger socks you stop some time before the end and the very pointy end can be a bit irritating. You can also do as you should for a proper Turkish heel, decrease every second row for a while and then every row for the last few decreases. This makes for a more rounded heel. I have not done any children's socks until now and all my nice sock books are somewhere in a box in S.A.
The decrease - I nearly forgot. Needle 1: Knit 1, slip 1, slip another 1 and then knit the 2 slipped ones together. Knit the next 5 sts. Needle 2: Knit 5 stitches, knit 2 together, knit 1. Needle 3: Knit 1, slip 1, slip another 1 and knit the 2 slipped sts together. Knit the next 5sts. Needle 4: Knit 5, knit 2 together, knit 1. Next row. Knit. Every second row decrease as above. Your decreasing involve the first 3 and last 3 stitches per side of your sock. You will see it makes a ridge looking similar to the ridge of the tow. If you do only the first and last 2 sts per side, your ridge will be much narrower and tends to be a bit holy.
When you have decreased till you have 2sts per needle left, rearrange the stitches to put them over 2 needles. Look where the side rib goes and line the needles up accordingly. Now you graft them together. This is a mission until you know what you do. I'll have to google for a nice site that shows it clearly and add the link here. I can do it now without thinking what I'm doing, but in the beginning I had the follow the instructions word for word for quite a number of socks.
When you work the threads away, work a few stitches around the corners of the heel and pull tight. It closes the odd gap that tends to appear there.
Whallah!! I love the sock moulds I found. They are only one size though. You cannot even see this one, but it is holding the sock up nicely!
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