Partisan sentiments
15 Apr 2023 04:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cimoreneHaving sampled both top-down and toe-up socks, I'm now of the opinion that there is little good reason to knit them top-down.
It's the older way, so there are plenty of patterns and people who simply learned one way and never went further, which is a quite legitimate reason. And it's technically possible for a complicated pattern to have some concern that makes the math easier that direction. But generally, once you get as far as comparing them, the toe-up method just creates an infinitely superior toe with Judy's Magic Cast-On and lets you just keep knitting the top until you're going to run out of yarn if you want to.
Patterns written for toe-up socks are vanishingly rare, though! This isn't a huge hardship - adapting the design bits if you have the right gauge, and knitting the toe and heel in your preferred method, is totally doable. But it's a disturbing sign of the failure of this superior technology to take hold!
It's the older way, so there are plenty of patterns and people who simply learned one way and never went further, which is a quite legitimate reason. And it's technically possible for a complicated pattern to have some concern that makes the math easier that direction. But generally, once you get as far as comparing them, the toe-up method just creates an infinitely superior toe with Judy's Magic Cast-On and lets you just keep knitting the top until you're going to run out of yarn if you want to.
Patterns written for toe-up socks are vanishingly rare, though! This isn't a huge hardship - adapting the design bits if you have the right gauge, and knitting the toe and heel in your preferred method, is totally doable. But it's a disturbing sign of the failure of this superior technology to take hold!
