Hang Hem
When you’re hanging a hem its important to line up your stitches. Otherwise you will get a twist in the hem.
When I do my standard hem top socks you may recall I do 40 rows in mock rib, replace the missing needles, do 2 more rows and then hang row 42 onto row 1.
And you may also recall, that as I begin to knit the second row, I place the beginning tail of yarn under the needles to knit it in as I go, which saves sewing the tail in at the end of the work.
I started this sock, as always, with the scrap yarn and the sock yarn pulled through between Needle Z and Needle A at the red hash mark. (This is Regia Silk, on the Verdun 47 machine, 72 needle cylinder.)
So the first stitch to knit in the sock yarn was on Needle A, as I knit counter clockwise.
To find that first stitch 42 rows later, follow the tail of the scrap yarn. There will be a bit of a hole and then the first stitch of the sock yarn. And if you look carefully at Stitch #1 down against the green scrap yarn, you will see it has a second bar of the sockyarn angling upwards and to the left of the stitch. That extra bar is from where I laid the tail of the yarn on the needles to knit it in. Looking for that little special configuration makes it very easy to locate the first stitch.
Now I take the bar of the first stitch and hang it (the horizontal bar, not the extra bar that angles up).
The stitch was made by needle A and the bar follows the stitch counter clockwise. So I hang it on the first needle counter clockwise to Needle A.
BUT WAIT! The next needle after A is X. And that needle wasn’t present when I knit the first row because I was in mock rib. I only put needle X in place after row 40.
So I hang the bar of Stitch 1 onto Needle 1, which was the first needle to knit after A.
I hope that didn’t come out more confusing than it is!
Another helpful thing to watch – since I was knitting the mock rib in 3 to one, you can clearly see, in both the sock and the scrap, vertical rows of 3′s. And when you hang the hem you are putting each group of three bars onto the corresponding group of 3 needles. AND the bar on the first of each group of three stitches is much bigger than the other two, since it skipped a needle when being made.
And since I always begin knitting at the right red hash mark, and I always set up my 3:1 mock rib so that there is ONE needle after the hash mark and two before it, then it ALWAYS works out that the first stitch I hang goes onto the third needle after the hash mark. (not the first needle – which made the stitch, and not the second needle, which wasn’t present when I did the mock rib.)