No One Knows My Toes

When it comes to shaping the toe, most sock patterns instruct the knitter to do matched decreases on every other row until about a third of the stitches remain and then to graft the remaining stitches. This produces a wedge shaped toe. My toes aren't wedge shaped and if I knit socks that are snug, which is how I like them, the toes are uncomfortable. My toes are sort of rounded and I want the toe of my socks to be rounded too so here's how I usually shape my toes.

For the first third of toe decreases, I decrease on every other row. For the second third of toe decreases, I decrease on every row and then I graft the remaining stitches together. The produces a nice round toe. Unfortunately, it also produces dog ears when you graft the last third of stitches. Ideally you should also do paired decreases on the grafted row since you've be doing paired decreases on the previous rows. Here's one way to do that.

You're doing a pair of decreases on the sole and another pair on the top. Of each of the pairs, one will be a K2TOG and one will be a SSK. You can do the K2TOG by grafting the two stitches as one but you need to shuffle the two stitches that you're going to SSK before you start. You do this to the second and third stitch on the needle closest to you and the second and third to last stitches on the needle farthest from you. Put the first, second and third stitches each on their own holder, then put the third stitch in back, put the second stitch back on the needle, then the third and then the first. It's just like a cable cross and looks like this.

Then you graft the stitches together, treating the second and third stitches as one and the second and third to last as one. Like this:

The end result looks like this from the front:

And this from the back:

And this from the top:

So the toe is rounded and comfortable and has no dog ears.