Tips & Tricks for Devious Knitters: Narrowing Socks-in-Progress

As you may be aware, I don’t particularly care for re-doing things in my knitting. So when a project is turning out to be, well, not quite what I had hoped, I will consider whether something can be done to modify it before ripping back or ripping out.

This was the case when a pair of socks I was knitting for the man about the house were coming out a little too wide. The man in question does have wide feet, but socks hold up best when they are worn slightly stretched, and these were … not.

I didn’t notice until I was nearing the heel (knitting from the toe up) and I asked him to try them on for length. Sadly, they slipped right onto his feet without stretching at all — which means they were going to be too loose. They would likely get baggy within the first few wearings, and that extra give in the fabric would make the socks more likely to felt within his shoes.

Rather than ripping all the way back to the toe decreases, I weighed my options. Ribbing pulls inward. Why not add some ribs? Dropping back stitches and laddering them back up as purls would be quicker than re-knitting most of a foot (or to be more precise, most of two feet, since I was knitting them two-at-a-time as I generally do).

So I chose a couple of spots on the top of the foot where a line of ribbing would look decorative, planning to continue it up the leg and incorporate it into a bit of cabling later. I dropped four stiches total on each sock, two on each side with a plain row in between, to create 1×1 ribbing. I dropped down to an area just above the toes. To be extra decorative, I staggered the end points of the rows of ribbing.

When laddering back, I find it useful to put something in the bottom stitch where I want the laddering to end, to prevent a runaway disaster. This can be a stitch marker that opens, a safety pin, a spare needle, or the end of the crochet hook I’m planning to use to ladder the stitches back up.

I turned the socks inside out and laddered them up on the wrong side, as knits, because I find it easier to ladder up knits than purls.

The resulting finished socks look like the ribbing was a planned design element, and more importantly, they fit as they should.