let me explaiKnit

More Toes in Rows

Christine wrote:
If you're taking requests - I want to do a short-row heel instead of the flap & gusset type that I've always done - but I have no idea how to do it.  I'll be searching tonight for tips, but if you have any, I would love to hear them!

I do have some suggestions!

A typical short-row heel is fairly simple.  You start with approximately 50% of the total stitches in the sock, and work back and forth, turning one stitch earlier each row, employing the gap-closing method of your choice, until you're down to the number of stitches you want at the base of the heel, and then you continue working, going one stitch further before turning on each row, so you're picking up one of the left-behind stitches and completing your gap closure on that stitch, until you're back to the number you started the heel with, and then you continue working in the round on the remainder of the sock.

That's the basic idea; there are still a few details to be worked out.

First, you need to decide how many stitches you're going down to at the base of the heel.  This is going to depend in no small part on the foot you're fitting; narrower heels will need fewer stitches, which means more short rows to get there.  You'll almost certainly want to go to at least 1/2 of the heel stitches; I have narrow heels, and like to continue until I've got only 1/3 of the heel stitches still active.  Priscilla Gibson-Roberts, in her book Simple Socks, Plain & Fancy, which is all about short-rowed heels and toes, recommends 20% of the total sock stitches, which is probably a good default if you don't know that the recipient has particularly wide or narrow heels.

Second, short-row heels are somewhat shallower than flap-and-gusset heels.  Some people find them comfortable anyway; others like to compensate for that by using 60% of the foot stitches to turn the heel, rather than 50%, which gives you a somewhat deeper heel. If you do this, you'll want to figure your heel base number as 1/4, 1/5, or 1/6 of the total stitches, not 1/2, 2/5, or 1/3 of the heel number you're currently using.  I'm not fond of this personally, but it's something to keep in mind; you may wish to experiment.

One effect of the shallower heel is that if you have a patterned leg, it tends to pull the pattern at the back down into the shoe.  I'd suggest compensating for this by having an ankle section as well as a leg section, another trick picked up from PGR.  To have an ankle section, you have a plain section, with no patterning, between the leg patterning and the point at which you start the heel turn; PGR suggests making this a number of rows equal to 20% of the number of stitch in the leg at this point.  If you've got patterning on the leg only, simply stop it above the ankle section and do the ankle in plain stockinette; if your patterning continues down to the top of the foot, stop the patterning on those stitches which will become the heel, and continue it on the front section, through the ankle and down to the foot.  I think if you do this, you'll find that it compensates for what it is about the shallow heel that some find annoying, and you won't need to go up to 60% of the stitches for the heel turn.

If you're converting a flap-and-gusset-heel pattern, I'd do the pattern as written down to the point where the heel flap starts.  From there, I'd do your ankle section; you'll be doing the back half plain and the front half as directed for the instep stitches in your pattern after picking up the gussets and returning to knitting in the round, for a number of rows equal to 20% of your total stitches.  You'll then do your short row heel, leaving the instep stitches idle, and then resume at the point where you left off for the instep stitches, and work the sole stitches plain, without decreases.  For the toe, you can do it as written in the pattern, or you can work a short row toe on half the stitches; this is done exactly the same way as a short-row heel, usually going down to half the toe stitches (1/4 of the total), and back up to the number you started with, and then the toe stitches are grafted to the other half of the foot stitches.  A short-row toe is usually somewhat shallower than a wedge toe, so you'll want to calculate how many stitches you'll be reducing, which will be the same as the number of rows to the tip of the toe, and use your row gauge to determine how much distance that will cover, which will tell you how far from the end of the foot to start your toe.  That's a lot of text, but I think you'll find it a fairly simple process when you've got it actually on the needles.

Rows for Your Toes

Okay, actually for your heels.  But that fails to rhyme.  Let's talk about how short rows work with sock heels.

There are, of course, many ways to do a sock heel.  One of them, which may be done from the toe up or the cuff down, is the short-row heel, where short rows are worked in an hourglass shape, just like that little bit of ASCII art I've inflicted on you in the last couple of posts.  These are quite classic short rows, and if a gap-closing method is not employed, gaps will ensue, giving you a row of holes marching neatly up the diagonal line from your heel to your ankle bone.

However, the top-down flap-and-gusset type of heel also uses short rows, but does not apparently employ a method to close gaps, and yet no gaps appear.  This is often extremely mystifying to the knitter who's just emerging from the stage of needing to follow patterns and starting to think about how things are really put together: short rows leave gaps if you don't prevent them, and these are clearly short rows, but there's no wrapping, and yet there are no gaps -- how can this be?

To begin with, the question, "Why are there no gaps?" contains a faulty assumption, because in fact there are gaps.  Some patterns, such as this cute little baby sock, even use the presence of the gap as a marker, so that you work until you're one stitch before the gap, and then work two stitches together.  And that, right there, is the secret answer to, "Okay then, smartypants, how did the gaps get closed when I wasn't looking?"  As we discussed last time, gaps are caused by the fact that the stitch before the turning point is not attached side-to-side to the stitch just after the turning point; they're closed by causing that attachment to be made after all.  By working the stitch just before the gap together with the stitch just after the gap, you're making that attachment, and the gap goes away.  How elegant!

Wrapped up in you

Last time we discussed short rows, and how they work conceptually.  As promised, this time we're going to learn about why short rowing causes gaps to form at the turning points, and what your choices are to prevent that.

To figure out why short rowing causes gaps, let's revisit the little ASCII diagram from the last post.  Once again, Xs will indicate actual stitches, and dashes the places where stitches don't exist because you turned before you got there.  So, short rows look like this:

13:  xxxxxxxxxxxx
12:  -xxxxxxxxxxx
11:  -xxxxxxxxxx-
10:  --xxxxxxxxx-
09:  --xxxxxxxx--
08:  ---xxxxxxx--
07:  ---xxxxxx---
06:  --xxxxxxx---
05:  --xxxxxxxx--
04:  -xxxxxxxxx--
03:  -xxxxxxxxxx-
02:  xxxxxxxxxxx-
01:  xxxxxxxxxxxx

In knitted fabric, a stitch that's in the middle of a row is typically connected to four other stitches: the one above and the one below in the same column, and the one to the left and the one to the right in the same row.  When you turn back for a short row, the last knitted stitch on the row does not get connected to the stitch on the other side of the turning point -- it's more like an edge stitch, connected above and below but only on one of the two sides.  For instance, the 3rd-column stitch on row 5 is connected to the 3rd-column stitches of rows 4 and 6, and its right leg is connected to the 4th-column stitch on the same row, but its left leg isn't connected to anything. The 2nd-column stitch on row 4 is connected at the top to the 2nd-column stitch in row 11, but not connected to row 5 at all.  You've essentially got edge stitches in the middle of your fabric.  This is what causes the gap.

In order to not have a gap, you've got to connect those edge stitches to the stitches on the other side of the turning point in some way.  There are a number of ways to do this.  The charming Nona did a nifty short-row experiment a while back, in which she demonstrated three methods: the wrap, the yarnover, and the Japanese methods.  She's done such a lovely job of covering the mechanics that I'm not going to repeat it; instead, I'll discuss why doing one of these techniques makes your gap disappear.

What you are doing when you do one of these techniques is giving yourself a place connected with the stitch on which you turned, which you can then come back and connect with the stitch on the other side of the turning point.  With the wrap method, you do this by putting a little loop around the base of the stitch past the turning point; with the yarnover method, the loop goes on the needle instead, but it's essentially the same thing, assuming you were going to hide the wraps using the wrap method.  With the Japanese method, what you're doing is a smidgen different, since you're just marking the working yarn and not actually drawing an extra bit of it out; it's a tad tighter, which may be why some people find it a little bit more invisible.

Let me expand for a moment on why I said the wrap method and yarnover method are "essentially the same thing."  When you do the wrap method, you could actually just leave the wrap, if your sole concern were pulling the gap closed.  However, the wrap is fairly obvious on stockinette, sitting there like a little collar around the base of a stitch.  Therefore, it's usual to pick up and hide the wraps when you come back to the wrapped stitch.  When you do this, you lift the wrap up from around the base of the wrapped stitch, and put it on the needle.  At this point, you've actually opened the gap back up, but then you go ahead and work the wrap together with the stitch it was on, and that closes it again.  What you've got at the moment when the wrap has been lifted up onto the needle is basically the same as what you've got when you've done the yarnover method instead, and that's why I say these are "essentially the same thing."

Most of the time, which gap-closing method you use is merely a matter of preference, based on what you personally find easier or more pleasant to do, or which gives you the nicest finished appearance.  There is a circumstance, however, where the wrap method may have a clear advantage, and that's where your project is such that hiding the wraps is unnecessary.  This may well be the case if your project is in garter stitch, or if your project is going to be felted; it's almost certainly going to be the case if your project is in garter stitch and going to be felted, which will render the wraps completely invisible.  Under that circumstance, since you will not have to execute the rather fiddly step of hiding the wraps, the ease of executing the actual wrap will generally make this method the obvious preferable choice.

I definitely encourage you to try out the various short row methods for yourself.  Repeat Nona's short-row experiment if you like, and see which suits you best.

Short and sweet

No, not a short post, but short rows.  I think I'll talk a little while today about using short rows in your knitting, both how they are done mechanically, and on a more conceptual level, what they do to and for the structure of your knitting.

Mechanically, short rows are pretty simple.  When you see a direction in a pattern that tells you to turn, at any point before you've knit all the stitches on that row, usually that's going to be a short row.  To follow this direction, all you do is turn the work around, putting the needle that was in your right hand into your left hand and vice versa.  The stitches you just finished working will now be on your left-hand needle, and the stitches you had not worked yet will be on your right-hand needle, and you will follow the next instruction in the pattern, working back over the stitches you had just completed.  Generally multiple short rows are worked, with one fewer or one more stitch being worked before the turning point on each row.

Sometimes the direction will not be simply "turn," but "wrap & turn," or some other similar thing.  For reasons that I will explain in the next post, short rows leave a gap in the knitting at the point where you turn, unless some action is taken to prevent such a gap from forming.  A wrap is one such action, and probably the most common one.  We'll talk about that more next time; for now, just understand that that's what the wrapping is for.

Conceptually, what are short rows doing?  Well, although they're called "short rows" for the way you stop short of knitting all the stitches on a row, they could also be called "long columns" for what they actually do.  Knitted fabric could be thought of as a matrix, with stitches forming not only horizontal rows, but also vertical columns of one stitch stacked atop another.  When you do short rows, some columns of stitches remain at one length, while the columns next to them receive extra rows of length since they're knitted additional times.

Let's have some ASCII art!  We'll use Xs to represent stitches, and dashes as a placeholder in the columns that aren't getting longer because the rows have stopped short of them.  So, when you do short rows, you get something like this:

13:  xxxxxxxxxxxx
12:  -xxxxxxxxxxx
11:  -xxxxxxxxxx-
10:  --xxxxxxxxx-
09:  --xxxxxxxx--
08:  ---xxxxxxx--
07:  ---xxxxxx---
06:  --xxxxxxx---
05:  --xxxxxxxx--
04:  -xxxxxxxxx--
03:  -xxxxxxxxxx-
02:  xxxxxxxxxxx-
01:  xxxxxxxxxxxx

The 2nd stitch in row 11, for instance, is attached to the 2nd stitch in row 4, the 3rd stitch in row 9 to the 3rd stitch in row 6, and so on.

The effect of this depends on the placement of the short-rowed section.  If it is placed on the edge of a piece of knitted fabric, so that the longer columns can be longer, then it causes a curved edge, which can be used to make a nice curve on the bottom edge of a garment, to add additional height at the back of a neckline, or to slope shoulders gently.  If it is placed in the middle of a section of fabric, so that the fabric above and below restrains the longer columns and does not allow them to take up more vertical space than the shorter columns, then the longer columns will bulge outward, which can be used to provide space for a heel in a sock, to provide additional bust room in a sweater or other garment (equivalent to horizontal darts), or more exotic shaping for things such as stuffed toys.

Once you understand that what short rows provide is length, it becomes easier to see how to use them.  You calculate the amount of additional length you need, and combined with your row gauge, that gives you the number of additional rows you need.

Next time, we'll discuss why short rows cause gaps, and the various methods for addressing that issue.