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In honor of finishing my first kneesock, which I am affectionately naming "Diamonds are Forever" since that's how long it felt like it would take... I am posting my long awaited article on how to make the perfect kneesock.

1. Figure out your gauge. Toe up this pretty much means knit the foot of your sock, and measure your stitches per inch. I strongly recommend measuring several places just to be sure its the same, and averaging it if it isn't. For cuff down, you need a gauge swatch. (I recommend a gauge swatch to get your toe ups to fit your foot but I know none of you will listen to me anyhow. Suffice to say that you need to know your gauge before you can shape your leg, and do your foot as you please).
2. Mark up your leg. You can do this with bandage tape or if you're like me, use a bic pen and just write right on your leg. Starting from the floor and measuring up your leg to the crease of your knee, make a little mark every inch along the inside of your leg, starting 4-5 inches above the floor. If you want to be super duper precise you can mark every half inch, but its really not that necessary.
3. Get out some paper and start making your chart. Collumn one is "Height from floor" Collumn 2 is "Width of leg" Collumn 3 is "Change from last mesure" Collum 4 is "extra stitches needed" Enter in your inch numbers from your leg in collumn 1 of the chart. If going top-down, start at the high numbers. If going toe up, start at low numbers (probably start at like 4)
4. Measure the circumference of your leg (i.e. go around the width of the leg) at each tic mark. Write the results you get in the chart in collumn 2, width of leg:
   
5. Calcualte increases. For collumn 3, cross out the top line - there's no change from the starting point! To get your answer for the remaining squares, take your number in collum 2 on this row minus the number in collumn 2 from the row above. For collumn 4, just multiply collumn 3 by your gauge, and round to nearest whole number if needed. Hint - if your subtraction is negative, this means to decrease. If its positive, this means to increase. You should need to increase, then decrease.
6. Putting this all in a sock. First, you need to know how many stitches you're starting with. For toe up, this is how many stitches you already have after you finihs your foot and heel. For a top down sock, this is your gauge times the inches in your top collumn 2 (minus an inch for negative ease).
7. Deciding when to start increasing. For top down you start increasing immedately following your ribbing. For toe up, its a bit trickier. You want start increasing at the point your leg is going to be too wide for the sock. For my foot, I like about 1 inch of negative ease everywhere, and I knit a 8 inch wide sock. So on my chart above, I would NOT start any increasing until after I've knit 6 inches of leg, because that's where my leg is 9 inches wide.
8. Placing decreases.
   • Toe up: Okay lets stich with my example chart here. I've knit 6 inches of leg and I know I need to fit a wider leg by the 7 inch mark. I cross off all the info in collumns 3 and 4 for 6 inches and shorter. I look at my chart and note I'll need 10 extra stitches by 7 inches. I knit for another 1/2 inch (sock 6.5 inches tall from floor to leg) then add half the stitches, at random intervals around the leg. I then knit another half inch (sock 7 inches tall) and add the other half. Then I do the same thing for the jump from 7 inches to 8 inches - first 1/2 of extras 1/2 inch up, second half right at the change point. Keep doing this until you get to either a 0 or a negative number on your chart. Now, you know the last inch of your sock is going to be ribbing. So now we need to do decreases, but we need to do them BEFORE they are needed, since we don't want to bother with decreasing on the ribbing. So when my sock is 13 inches wide, on the next row I want to do ALL 2 decreases I'll need to a 14 inch wide sock. When my sock is 14 inches long, I do all 3 decreases I need at 15 inches long. And finally, when I'm at 15 inches long, I do ALL 10 decrases I need and then do my 1 inch of ribbing. Bind off with somethng nice and stretchy.
   • Cuff down: Cast on stitches equal to gauge X (width of top of leg-1) and knit 1 inch of ribbing. Sock is now 1 inch long, and needs to be wider! In your first non ribbing row, make ALL the increases needed for the next row down on your chart, placed randomly and evenly spaced around the leg. Knit 1 inch and make ALL the increases needed for the next row and so on until you reach either a 0 or a negative number in your chart. At this point we're going to start spreading out the decreases. Do half of them immediately, then knit 1/2 inch, and knit the remaining half. Continue this until you have decreased to the number of stitches you usually need for the heel and foot of your sock (or the leg of a normal sock you do at this gauge) Finish heel and foot based on your favorite sock pattern using your current gauge.

My "please forgive us" yarn from Universal yarns arrived at Communkitty and I picked it up last night. This is the yarn sent in recompense for the socks that don't match. I haven't yet had a chance to work on it due to still working away on the socks that never end, nto to mention having a dozen other projects clammouring for me to start them, but I did take the time to play with it a bit. My first task was to skein it up. I wanted a chance to know the color repeats a bit, and I was looking for werid dyespots and knots, knowing this is a prototype yarn and it may be less than perfect. So I whipped out my niddy noody and went to town.

Details: Universal Yarns, Wisdom line, Marathon, Chicago, color # 236. As you can see, the yarn is sort of muted shades of wine-red, eggplant-purple and olive-brown with some bits of undyed cream. Its mostly brown and purple. I measured it out to be a 35 meter long color sequence repeat with many rather short sections of color (~20-40 inches) and a few long (3-5 meters) stripes of color. The sequence, should you really care, was Red and purple, purple, short red, short white, medium whote and brown, long red, looooong purple, brown, short purple, short white, looooong brown, brown and white, purple and brown, purple, purlple and brown, brown, shrt white, long brown and white.

As for yarn flaws... there's some spots where the colors don't seem to line up perfectly, which I suspect is due to it being a prototype. There were no knots per se, as in no places where the yarn was broken, but I did have to untangle 3 minor slip knots (which were clearly wound into the ball as they came at places where it was smoothly flowing out of the center). Overall the yarn seems nice, about average softness and thickness (not so thin as trekking or thick as socks that rock, same softness as most store bought balls) I actually like the colors as I prefer muted tones - they go with everything. I just have no idea when I'll knit it up... I do have a few stitch patterns in mind for it though, given that the repeat is long enough they will have to be fraternal socks. There's really very few stitch patterns that can handle self striping yarn, but this one skeins out as if it will act sort of as a combo part handpainted part self striping. Many of those repeats were rather short (1 meter or less), so I expect thin stripes with several thicker bands. That alone makes me curious and want to cast it on. Most self-patternings I have touched have rather consistently sized bands of color and pattern, usually 4-5 rows per section, and it will be fun to play with a more randomly widthed one.

All in all, I'm willing to knit with this yarn... :-P Its better quality than what I'd originally bought, despite being a prototype, and I'm willing to forgive so far.

I would really like to have enough data to give good sizing information to others. A sample of 13 really isn't enough. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE fill out my Knee Sock Survey. Thanks!

So to follow up that beg for data (I LOVE data!) I will leave you all with the knee sock theme song:

This is the sock that never ends
It just goes on and on my friends
This blogger started knitting it, not knowing what it was
And she'll continue knitting it forever just because
This is the sock that never ends.........
...