changing top down sock pattern to toe up??

[knew2knitting]

Hey guys!! I really like to knit my socks toe up. Yet a lot of the patterns out there are written top down. Now everyone but me may know the answer to this, but I was wondering if you all might tell me how to "revise" the patterns to toe up. I have seen lots of people here say that they worked the pattern the opposite of the written way, so I KNOW it is being done. Could you guys PLEEEEEAASE let me in on the secret???

TIA!!

[knitqueen]

This is what I would do. Cast on using the magic cast-on method, casting on the number of stitches that you would have been left with had you knit from the top down and had finished your toe decreases. Then increase 4 stitches per round, every other round, until you have the total number of stitches that had been used for the foot of the sock. Then just carry on and complete the foot.

When you get to the heel....I know there are ways of doing a heel flap for a toe up sock, but I don't really know how cause I'm just learning toe-up myself, but if you do a short row heel , it doesn't matter if you're working toe up or top down, you do the heel exactly the same way.

Once the heel is done you just work the leg until you get to the cuff, then bind off loosely.

[five_six]

I do all my socks toe up too, and thought I might also jump in with a quick question - if the sock is patterned at all, does one just flip the chart upside down, or read from the top to bottom instead of bottom to top?

[knew2knitting]

That was my question too, five_six. I don't know if you read the pattern backwards, or just what to do. I guess maybe I didn't make my question clear. I was wondering if you had a patterned sock, or maybe using a chart. Do you start with the last line, or ummmm......??

[knitqueen]

I've been trying to wrap my head around this. At first I wondered whether if you read the chart from the top down rather than from the bottom up if the decreases would be slanting the wrong way (if there are decreases involved). But I just looked at a sock I'm currently working on that has LOTS of decreases, K2tog's and SSK's and discovered that a left slanting decreases still looks like a left slanting decrease even when flipped upside down (toe up vs. cuff down), the only difference being that the 'V' of the stockinette is either right side up or upside down which to me doesn't make a difference at all - you wouldn't even notice.

I think the best thing to do would be to make a swatch of the stitch pattern but work the chart from the top down and see what kind of fabric it makes.

Personally, I haven't seen many stitch patterns that would matter whether it was upsidedown - they're all pretty symmetrical. Now if you were doing some kind of heart or other 'shape' motif then yes it would matter, but you'd have to use your discretion and personal preference in those cases.