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Lesson Info
Heel Flap
All right, once you finished the cuff, you are ready to work on the heel flap. The heel flap is the only time in this whole project that you will not be working in the round. You're actually gonna be working back and forth. So the first thing that you wanna do is you wanna ditch half the stitches. And you can either put them on one needle, just hanging loosey-goosey, or if that makes you uncomfortable 'cause you're afraid stitches are gonna drop off, you can go ahead and put them on waste yarn or put it on a holder. It's totally your call, whatever makes you the most comfortable. So that's the top half. And then the back half is 26 stitches, but if you're changing the size of the sock, just know that your heel takes up half of the stitches. You're gonna put those on one other needle. And we're only gonna be working with those stitches for the heel portion. We are also only working in one color for the heel. You could keep striping if you wanted to, but for this particular pattern, I've...
chose to just have a solid heel of the foot. So to knit the heel, you're gonna start by slipping that first stitch, and then this is where we're gonna join the yarn. You're gonna have to rejoin the yarn, probably. Or actually, you know what? If you didn't cut the yarn after the cuff, you can just pick it up and pull it. Just depends on, you know, whatever you did is fine. And you're gonna knit that stitch. And from here on, we're gonna be slipping one and then knitting one. And we're gonna do that all the way across. When you slip a stitch, just in general when a pattern says slip a stitch, unless it says otherwise, always assume that you slip it pearl-wise, meaning you enter the stitch through the loop as I just showed you, let it slide, and then knit the stitch normally. And you're gonna do that. This stitch is actually on backwards, which this is, when I was transferring the needles, I didn't get them on the right way. But this is a really good sort of teaching moment for you to see. I can tell that this is on backwards because of the way that it's oriented. See how wide-open that stitch is? It shouldn't look like that. It shouldn't be that free and easy. It should feel more stressed. I know that I need to turn that around. See how it's no longer wide-open? That is the proper orientation for a knit-stitch. So I've got that on; I just knit the last stitch. I'm gonna slip it. Knit, slip, all the way across. And what we're doing is we're creating what's called a reinforced heel. It's gonna give you a little bit bulkier of fabric than it would if you were just knitting the heel. This is great just because it gives you a little bit more cushioning on that heel. It's also, you know, shoes tend to wear against the heel. So you can get a little more wear and tear on that. And so this will help protect that. And so we're all the way. We're to our last stitch, so we're knitting that last stitch. Then, we're gonna flip our work over. Remember, we're working back and forth for the heel, so we won't be going around. So now we're on the back of it. For the back, you wanna also slip the first stitch. So you may have noticed that we slipped the first stitch on the front side as well. This will be kind of apparent later; I'll show you. But what it's doing is that slip-stitch will create a really nice guideline for where we're gonna be picking up stitches later on. So I slip that first stitch, and then we're gonna pearl all of the stitches, the rest of the stitches across. We've created on the front side kind of a ribbing effect, a slip-one, knit-one ribbing. But we could not, if we slipped those same stitches on the way back, that would mean they never got worked, which would mean that they would never create that length of fabric that you need to create a heel. So, we're working them on the wrong side, so they do get a little bit of that distance of fabric knit. All right, so I'm coming to the end of these stitches. You're gonna flip your work over. Oops, it looks like a dropped a stitch down here. Pick that up; make sure it gets worked. Now we're flipping it over. Okay, so, from here, we're just gonna repeat on. You slip, you know, you have to slip that first stitch. Knit one, slip one pearl-wise, knit one, all the way across. And you're just gonna continue doing that until your heel measures the length that's noted in the pattern or until it's formed a perfect square. And I'm gonna bring in another example. This one is wee, though. We're gonna be moving on from here on to a little tiny version. But I wanna show you this one, just so you can see what I'm talking about for perfect square. So I'm flipping this over to the back. So if you wanted to be, what I love about this is that there's no math involved. You don't have to worry about measuring if you don't have a measuring tape. All you have to do is fold over the square. And if it creates that perfect triangle where the edge matches up, you know that you're done. You finished that heel. Isn't that cool? Super easy-peasy. Okay, so now, we know that we've got our heel flap completely done, and now we are ready for the next step.
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Ratings and Reviews
E.L. Bl/Du
VICKY is so awesome, and now Im ready to knit socks. Ive been wanting to for a long time, she is so great about encouraging us to jump in. She has a way of making what seems so complicated seem easy and do-able. I am actually super excited about trying. I really miss all her great tips on Knitty Gritty, and was so delighted to see her on CL, my 2 favorites together, what could be better....MORE PLEASE....
Laurie Andrews
Really happy to have learnt how to make socks it's always been something I've wanted to learn for years thanks Vicky really enjoyed the video will be telling all of my friends about you xx
evilmiss
Love Vickie Howell and I love this class! I've been wanting to learn how to knit socks for awhile and when I saw that Vickie was teaching this class I knew I had to join!
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