Toe Up Knee Socks Step 3: Adding a Simple Motif

First of all, you all know that patterns on the leg of a sock can go from the very simple to the very complicated. I'm going to stay focused on adding a simple motif to the sides of the sock since it makes it easier to explain how to decide where to place your increases and decreases -- and because when you're dealing with an all-over pattern, how you place the increases and decreases takes a significant knowledge of the pattern motif you have chosen, and it's rather hard to generalize that for the purposes of a blog post.

Anyway, if you want to add a simple motif to your sock, the first thing you have to do is decide on the motif. What motifs you choose should have a lot to do with your yarn.

Striping yarns, like the Sock Hop yarn that I used, tend to be best shown off in motifs that have bias -- in other words, the stitches lean one way or another and as a result, the stripes are also shown in interesting ways (Gruperina's Jaywalker socks are an excellent example of a biasing pattern highlighting stripey sock yarn).

Solids and semi solids will show off eyelet, lace and cable designs a bit better because the subtle color variations don't distract visually from the pattern you are knitting.

Variagated, non-striping yarns tend to do their best work either in solid stockinette or with simple all-over textured patterns like ribbing. Variagation, like stripes, tends to distract from elaborate stitch work.

But at the end of the day, it's all really about what you like. I've seen some great cabling done with stripey yarn and lovely lace in strongly variagated yarn. If you aren't sure, I recommend that you swatch just a little bit before trying it out with your sock to make sure that you like the effect -- it's a lot easier to swatch a little motif and rip it out to try something else than to have to rip out 3-4" of sock if the motif doesn't make you happy.

When I picked Ears of Grass from Barbara Walker's Second Treasury, I did so because of the subtle biasing and the simple but well defined yarn overs. I thought that if it was simple, it might work well with the Sock Hop which has very irregular striping. And I did a little swatch beforehand to be sure I liked it.

Something else to keep in mind about motifs: lacy motifs will tend to add "give" to your sock and give you a looser sock, cables will suck up stitches and give you a tighter sock. Stranded stitches will decrease the flexibility of the sock, as will some biasing stitch patterns. You need to keep this in mind when thinking about your increases and decreases. This is another place where being able to try on the sock as you go pays off since you can add increases and decreases as you need to as you go.

Ears of Grass Motif

Since a number of folks expressed an interest in having a charted version of this motif, I am providing you with both an image (right click and you can save it to your computer) and the Excel file that contains the original diagram. You can download file by clicking here. In order to see the knitting symbols, you will need to download and install the font from Aire River Design -- it's free for personal and professional use.

So where to start? First of all, I'm starting with 56 stitches on my needles, and I'm using four double points, on which I have 14 stitches/needle.

My motif, however, is 15 stitches across, and since there are decrease stitches on either edge, I'd like to have an extra "selvedge" stitch on either side of the motif, so for each motif I need to have 17 stitches on a needle.

The first thing to do then, is to get my needles into position. After my short row heel, I have two needles over the back of the sock and two needles over the front of the sock. I'm going to shift all the stitches now so that the stitches at the right edges of my needles become the center stitches so that the motif can be centered on the sides of the sock. In the process of doing that, I'm gong to make sure that I have 16 stitches on the needles meant for the motif and 12 stitches on the needles in the front and back of the leg.

Because I don't want my motif covered up by shoes, I decided not to start the motifs until I added about an inch of straight stockinette above the heel. This is personal preference. You can start your motif where ever you like.

Since I needed an odd number of stitches on my motif needle, on the last row of straight stockinette, I did a make 1 between the 2 center stitches of each of the motif needles to set up for the motif. If you have a motif with an even number of stitches, you obviously won't need to worry about this at all. If you have to do this, make sure you remember to factor this into your increases -- I only did two increases in my first increase row instead of 4 to compensate for the increase I used to center the motif.

Now you're just going to knit in the round until you get to the point where you need to start your increases. Which brings up the last thing you need to think about before you just whip out the rest of the sock -- where do you put your increases?

In the case where you have two side panel motifs, you want to keep them evenly spaced between the front and the back. This means that you can't put all your increases in the back (as you probably would if you were doing just straight stockinette) or you will start pushing your motifs towards the front of the leg. What I chose to do was to divide my increases evenly between the back and front needles. Since I was doing 4 increase stitches per increase round, that meant 2 increases at the front and two at the back. I chose to do my increases at the center of the front and back needles because I wanted them to be visible (I thought it was an interesting design element. But if you wanted them to be more subtle, you could put them on either edge of the needle near the motif. What kind of increase should you use? That's a matter of personal taste, but I chose left and right leaning make 1 stitches because I find them to be the most subtle increases that I can execute well.

The decreases work the same way. I chose to do them centered on the front and back needles. But again, if you want a more subtle look, you could move them to the edges of the front and back needle where they are closer to the side motif.

Different motifs or patterning on the leg of your sock clearly call for different kinds of increase work. If you'd like to see a beautiful ribbed knee sock where the increases were taken into the back of the sock, check out Kristi's post at Kntter's Anonymous (if Kristi and Cookie's blog doesn't give you sock yarn lust, I don't know what will... Cookie is she of the beautiful Pomatomus socks so there is much socky goodness to be found therein). Grumperina knit some stunning two color Estonian styled knee socks and did the increases on the sides of the socks to properly maintain central patterns on the front and back of the sock. And Cara at January One has a pair of straight stockinette knee socks where she did all the increases up the back of the calves. Hopefully these examples give a good idea of some of the possibilities for using the increases and decreases creatively to enhance your design.

Probably the last thing to discuss is when to stop your motif? I don't have a great answer for that. In my case, since the motif was 20 rows and it didn't makes sense to do a partial motif, I did as many complete motifs as I could before the ribbing. This meant, to get to the length of the sock that I wanted, with the amount of ribbing that I wanted, that I had about an inch of straight stockinette before the ribbing. If I'd had a 5 - 10 row motif, I would have run it all the way up to the ribbing. Unfortunately, this is just one of those things that it's hard to create a rule for given that there are so many different stitch patterns with so many different row intervals. The knitter just has to use their best judgement.

So that pretty much brings this little technique dialog to a close. Go forth and knit knee socks! There's still plenty of winter left to go!