Sock Surgery

This post is not for the squimish. You have been warned.So I was knitting a pair of anklets from a ball of Gems Opal in my stash, when I got to where I was going to start the short row heel. I looked at how much yarn I had left and was a little dubious, so I weighed it. Out of a 50 g skein (normally enough for anklets for me), I had only 10 g left without having started the heel at all.

I knew that this couldn't be right. There was no way I could finish these with that little. So I faced a few options. As I was unwilling to completely rip these out and start over, the most compelling was to use a fine gauge DPN to hold the stitches, make a quick incision, rip out the toe and then reknit it with some extra sock yarn.

Whew! It is amazing how much work I will do to get out of some work huh? So here is where I started removing stitches from that captive row. This actually went really smoothly. I was surprised.

And here is the sock sans toe. Please disregard the stitch that slipped off. I was fudging with these while getting ready to take a photo and apparently didn't notice it. Fortunately nothing bad happened, and I fixed it immediately following the photo.

Then all that was left was re-knitting the toe actually as I would if this was a cuff-down sock. Tada! Now I just need to add coordinating heels and then knit the cuffs. Not bad!

Note that if you had worn out a toe or heel you could replace them in just the same way. I had the idea this was possible given the provisional cast-ons I have done in the past, but after I finished the operation here I found a good description of how to do this in The Twisted Sister Sock Workbook. This book is great and full of such handy little things.