This rather plain looking pair of socks is a milestone for me.
They are an adaptation of a pattern I tried and walked away from several times over the past few years. I simply didn’t get it. There were knitting terms that were unclear to me as a non hand knitter. I’m fairly sure there were bits of instruction missing that may have been taken for granted a knitter would know. And the pattern was written for a 60 stitch sock which I almost never knit, so I was trying to translate things I didn’t know into a size that wasn’t given.
The original pattern was in an issue of the sock machine newsletter published by Bonnie Smola. It was not included on the CD compilation of patterns that I have referred to in the past. Perhaps the pattern was thought to be too difficult ;o)
But I’ve always said that with a sock machine its important to know when to walk away. And to go back later.
The big(gest) difficulty is that on a sock machine you are working with a fixed number of stitches – you can’t just increase a stitch when there is no slot and needle for it.
So the solution?
Knit the insole separately from the sole of the foot. That way you can knit flat using half of the needles – or more, or less – which allows increasing and decreasing, and then join the top and bottom sections together later, just before doing the toe.
In a nutshell:
Knit the top of the sock and leg in whatever standard method is preferred. When coming to the heel, stop with the yarn carrier at 12 o’clock instead of 6 o’clock, and raise out of work all the needles between the red hash marks on the 6 o’clock side of the machine. This leaves the top half of the needles in work, and it is upon these needles we knit the top of the foot (insole). (And don’t get me started about how for umpteen years I thought the insole was the bottom of the foot – I mean its got the word sole right in it!)
In my sample pair, I’m knitting size Large on the 72 cylinder. So I have 36 needles in action on the top of the machine. Knit back and forth to make as many rows as you would normally do for a foot. I’m using my thinner undyed wool/nylon fingering weight, so 80 rows (40 back, 40 forth). I finish on the left side, cut the yarn leaving a tail, tie on scrap yarn and knit 15 or 20 rows, and then run this work right off the needles and just leave it inside the cylinder. And, then remove all the 36 needles just emptied.
Turning my attention now to the heel – on this pair I’ve done the simpler version of the Eye of the Partridge heel in this pattern: Row 1: Sl1, K1 repeat to end of row; Row 2: Sl1, knit to end. Repeat the pair of rows 18 times for 36 row total, and this will give 18 chain stitches on each side of the heel flap. (This A to B in the photo below.)
To turn the heel – I did the Sl1, K5, Ktog, K to end repeat that until the heel flap has been decreased to 10 stitches remaining, ending with the yarn carrier on the left. (This is B to C in the photo below.)
(The tip given by Pat in the comments of Sl1, K5, K2tog gave me a much tidier chain stitch from the Sl1;s)
Then replace 20 needles on the right side, and pick up all the chain stitches from the side edge of the heel turn and the heel flap (So, the sides of A to C in the photo below). There are more than 20 chain stitches, so spread them evenly – this worked out to hang two, skip one, hang two, skip one etc. This little @#@#@$#&*^ piece of information is what took me three @#@#$@*&^ years to figure out. I was hanging the first 20 chain stitches and then creatively and disastrously trying to integrate the remaining stitches is all manner of ways!
After knitting across, 20 needles are then placed on the left side, and the chain stitches picked up from that side. Ending with this.
So. Now we are working with 50 needles, and we need to reduce that back down to 36 before as we join the top and bottom of the foot together. This decreasing will form the triangular gussets. That process is basically: 1 row of K2tog, knit to end, Pick up one side stitch from insole. (the needle left over from the K2tog is moved to the other side of the cylinder and used to pick up the insole stitch – so on this row, there is no net change in the number of needles. The next row is a decrease row – it is a K2tog, K1, K2tog, K to last 4 stitches, K2tog, K2, Pick Up Stitch from insole. Now the first K2tog and the last Pick Up stitch in this row are exactly the same as the first row – shifting the needle emptied with the first K2tog to the opposite side to accommodate the stitch picked up from the side of the insole. The other two K2tog are decreases that shape the gusset – one on each side – and those two needles we remove from the machine. Recall that in the K2tog we move the remaining needles together to close the gap.
Repeat those two rows over and over until there are 37 needles remaining in work – half of the total needles, plus one. We’ve now completed the gussets, and at the same time those Pick Up sitches at the end of each row were starting to tie in the insole.
Now we join the rest of the insole as we finish knitting the foot. To do this we: K2tog, knit to end, Pick Up stitch from the insole. And we do that until the foot is completed. With each pass (remember we’re going back and forth, not round and round) the K2tog empties one needle, which me move to the opposite side and use for the Picked Up stitch. So we have one needle that we shift back and forth on each pass.
When we run out of stitches on the insole, the foot is complete and we have arrived at the scrap yarn that we knit onto the insole just before we ran it off the machine. So now we replace all the missing needles in the cylinder, and rehang the stitches between the good yarn and the scrap yarn onto the needles.
Knit a toe, and yer dun.

My description of work here isn’t a complete pattern - just a rough and dirty outline.
I may tweak some of the details. Like the heel turning, where I decreased to 10 stitches (at C) – I’m not sure that shouldn’t be 12 instead of ten.
And I don’t know that I’ll stick with the ‘knit the entire insole’ thing. 80 rows is a lot of back and forth, and a huge amount of K2tog, and Pick Up – each time a stitch being moved is an opportunity to drop it! I think the insole could be done as a partial flap for just as many rows as it takes for the gusset to be finished in the corresponding rows below it, then once you’re back to a total of 72 stitches, knit the rest of the sock in the round. That would shave a good hour off the work.