#counts!

Basically what you’re doing is putting a seam across the heel to turn a heeled sock into a tube, and then cutting the toe end open and hemming the raw edges to open that end of the tube. It’s a bit tricky because socks are stretchy, and this was not my finest attempt, but here goes. 

Turn the socks inside out and flatten them so that the heels and the “bottoms” of the feet face up. 

The sock on the left is normal. The sock on the right has had the heel of it pinched up , so that the yellow heel bit forms a sort of flap. What you want to do is pinch the heel up on each sock and then turn it over and fold it, so that the “foot” is folded back on the “ankle” and the heel sticks out. Like so: 

The one on the left has been folded back so that the heel sticks out. The scissors are pointing at the heel, even though it looks like it could be the toe. The one on the right hasn’t been turned over and folded yet, to illustrate the difference. 

Now you can cut the toes open across the top and fold them back, like on the one on the right here: 

I usually do two folds so that the raw edges where you cut are completely tucked under. 

Time to sew! First you want to just sew across the heel, making sure that you don’t catch any of the other side of the sock (I reach into the pocket made by the foot and ankle and pull the fabric out a bit just to be sure. If you want, you can be extra careful and sew like this, above the line where yellow meets red: 

But that means when you turn it right side out, that yellow will show – you’ll see later. Just make sure that you are only sewing the heel fabric to itself, not any other fabric. You can trim off the “flap” once you’ve sewn it if you want, I usually don’t bother.

Now you have to stitch a seam all the way around the folded-back-toe bit. There’s no good way to photograph this or explain it, but when it’s done it’ll look like this: 

It helps if you stretch out the fabric a bit as you sew, because that will make for long, slightly loose stitches, and the cuff will stretch a bit when you slip it over your hand. This takes some focus, because you have to stretch the fabric and feed it through the machine with one hand, while rotating it and keeping the other side of the hem clear with the other. You’re basically sewing around the hole you’ve made in one long loop. 

But then you’re done! Turn them right side out, take a look, and adjust as necessary. You can see in this how the yellow shows through on the first one I did, and how I went a little overboard to prevent that on the second one. But they’ll wear well.