Toes Up!

I've been curious about this toe-up sock thing. What's the appeal, other than that you knit a sock from the toe upward, and there's minimal fuss about grafting toes and picking up stitches, while you have to jump through a lot more hoops to knit a sock starting with the cuff.. in theory, at least. Last night, I was seized by the impulse to start working on a sock from the toe up, so I pulled out my yarn and some needles and went to work. It's much harder than it looks!

Knitty.com ran an article in its Winter 2002 issue about this very topic; to whit, it was an article about three ways of getting toe-up socks started. Okay... the figure-eight cast on doesn't look so hard, I thought, so that's what I'll try first. I'm sure a number of profane exclamations left my mouth when I started working on it. By about 2 AM, I was ready to throw everything out the window because it wasn't going as easily as I thought it was. Where were all these big gaps coming from? And how in the world do you get from knitting at both ends to knitting in the round? And what happens to the tail of the yarn? It just sort of looks like it's sprouting out of the middle of the toe. In the end, I gave up and frogged what little progress I'd made.

This afternoon I decided to try again, so out came the white yarn and the needles. Several hours later, I had what looked like the beginning of a tiny little bag--now there's an idea that's worth exploring later on. One of the problems for me, which I don't have with a sock knit from the top down, is that I can't seem to figure out where the round ends and where it begins; this makes it hard to place the increases, which I'm sure I got in the wrong places. After getting a little way into it, I decided to go ahead and bind it off, and the result made me laugh. As crude as it sounds, I think it looks sort of like a knitted diaphragm. I think I'll stick to knitting socks from the top down after this...