I made a decision to jettison all the cabled legs and ribbed tops I got free of charge with my Harrison machine. The person I bought the machine from made long lengths of rib, scrap, rib, scrap. She then cut them apart, and rehung them onto the machine and knitted cabled legs scrapping them off at the ankle. Her customers then chose the colour and leg length they wanted and she added the foot the size they wanted.
Having only converted two pairs into socks despite having them here for about four or five years now, and for the other reasons given below, I have no reservations about letting them go. In one bag I found a couple of finished pairs, and even though I say it myself they don't look a patch on my socks so I am now even more convinced I have made the right decision.
My reasons are as follows – I hate picking up the stitches again, I didn’t actually get the matching wool to knit the feet for a lot of them, I didn’t much like the finished socks; a cable leg on an 84 cylinder is enormous, I don’t like using this particular pure wool for socks to sell (it shrinks as easy as blinking), and the only socks I have worn a hole in were ones made in some of that wool, despite the fact I hadn’t worn them all that much.
I am still not convinced that making the ribs all in a row with scrap spacers, rehanging them and doing the same with the legs, and then rehanging again for the feet is any quicker than just knitting the sock all in a piece. The idea is that it's much quicker if you don't have to keep changing the needles in and out, but that's not a lot slower than rehanging and it gives another two lots of ends to darn in.
I'm sure that I would get quicker at it with more practise, but it is such a fiddly job. Because of the nature of sock machines and the needles caught down in the cams, you can't put all the stitches on all the needles. If you miss a stitch or a needle, you don't always find out about it until it is too late, or it's really difficult to correct it.
