Heel Flap

It’s now time to make the heel flap of your first sock. To create a textured heel flap like a slip-stitch heel or the Eye-of-the-Partridge heel, see Advanced Top-Down Socks: Heel-Flap Pattern Stitches.

Turn Heel

Immediately after working the heel flap of the first sock, we turn the heel. Here’s how to do it.

Pick Up And Knit For The Gusset

Now, pick up and knit the specified number of stitches along the left side of your heel flap. Learning to do this technique correctly will definitely help your knitting in all areas improve – sweaters and other advanced patterns call for you to do this often. Knowing how to do it right is fun.

Repeat On Second Sock

When working two-at-a-time top-down, the order in which you knit each part of the sock is very important.

Since we can’t go any further on the first sock, it’s now time to return to the heel flap instructions, and repeat them, back to the same point in your pattern, for the second sock – except this time, consider the following challenge:

Bonus – How To Knit (Well, Purl, Really) Backwards

This technique is optional, but take a look and see if you feel comfortable trying it.

It will save you a lot of time because if you know how to do it, you don’t have to turn your work back and forth every row.

This technique is very useful in Entrelac knitting, where you constantly have to turn your work after only a few stitches, and, of course, in turning any sock heels or doing any kind of short-rows.

Finish Picking Up All Stitches

Continuing to follow your pattern, pick up and knit the stitches along the left side of your second heel flap.

Next knit across both insteps, and, when you return to ready position, it’s time to pick up and knit along the right sides of your heel flaps.

Shape Gusset

I showed you the triangular gusset in our walk-through video. Now it’s time to add a gusset to these top-down socks.

We now have a lot of stitches on the heel needle, and we’ll decrease this number gradually, decreasing on stitch each time we reach the heel, until the original number of stitches remains.

The video above shows you how to tighten your picked-up stitches and knit your gusset without having to continually look back at your pattern. Yay!

Once you are finished with the gussets (and be patient, they take longer than you might think), you’ve rounded the corner and are headed for the finish line.