Charity Knitting Thick Wool Socks & How to Seam Them

Here are some socks that I knitted on my SR 860 for the 'Afghans for Afghans' program. Socks are desperately needed as the weather is very cold in the winter time. These are worsted weight socks made from 100% wool. If you like to knit smaller charity items these are great!!

Now.....I want to talk a little bit about these socks. They are knitted flat on the machine & then seamed up the side by latching up the bars at the edge of the knit. To make this work you have to think ahead a bit. I am going to talk about a sock that is 36 stitches wide just for the purpose of my demonstration. Your needle arrangement will be like this.....

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The first stitch is placed on needle #19 left, & the last stitch is #19 right. Needle #18 on each side is left empty so that when you get ready to seam you have a looser bar below the knot on the side of the knit. (I am assuming that you know that the side of the knit is an edge of knots & bars. You will have a bar, then a knot, then a bar, then a knot & so on. Like this

-x-x-x-x with the dashes being bars & the x's being knots.) When you get ready to seam you will be using your latch tool to pull one bar, skipping the knot, through the next bar on the opposite side. Pay attention to the bars & knot because it is easy to get confused when you first start learning this technique. You don't want to use the same bar twice as it won't make a good looking seam. Keep latching one bar through the next bar on the opposite side, going from side to side. You always want the bar above the next knot.

This gives a very flat & comfortable seam that you wouldn't get if you used a different seaming method with this thickness of yarn. Although the seam is very obvious, comfort is the wanted result. If you look closely you can see where the bars have been latched from one side to the other in a zigzag fashion. The seam will lay flat on the wearer's leg without rubbing at all.