Let’s Talk About Socks, Baby!

I have most of a sock!

I turned the heel and did the gussety bits yesterday and it was a lot easier than I’d expected. I really only screwed up a couple of times and nothing was so bad it couldn’t be fixed or tolerated. The main thing I did was to pick up stitches along the wrong edge of the heel flap and then couldn’t figure out why I was basically knitting on the inside of the sock instead of the outside, but I figured it out pretty quickly. If you think of the cuff and leg of a sock as a tube because, well, it is, and then imagine a squared off tab extending from the back bottom edge, that’s where I was. Holding the sock cuff edge down with the heel tab closest to me, I should have picked up stitches along the left edge, knitted (around) across the front of the ankle, then picked up stitches along the right edge of the tab, then knitted around the back of the heel. If you think about the heel flap as being at 6 o’clock then I should have started at about 7 and knit clockwise around. Instead, I started at about 5 and tried to go the other way. Didn’t work! But was very easy to pull out and get going the right way instead. The problem? I didn’t read the pattern thoroughly enough and missed the last row on the heel flap. Trust the pattern, kids! Unless it’s wrong and then listen to your gut. But otherwise, sometimes you just have to have trust in the pattern and re-read it until it gels.

How do you tell the difference? The short answer is I don’t know. But with the advent of ravelry, at least you can browse through other people’s projects and, if no one mentions crazy weird issues, chances are you’re misreading something.

Here’s the right side of the heel and gusset:

And the left side:

The right side worked pretty well, but I learned a couple of things on the left side. I didn’t pick up the stitches cleanly so there’s a couple stray plies of yarn out of place for some of them. Now that I know to be careful of that, I can do it better next time around. The other thing I’m not completely happy with is the first couple of stitches I picked up on this side. They are sort of at the top of the upside down V formed by the heel flap. They’re right at the top of the last pic. They made large holes that I couldn’t find a way to prevent. I knitted them through the back loops on the first round, but they still gap a good bit. I will have to do a little research on how to do that better so there’s not so much of a hole.

And here’s the bottom of the heel:

So far, I’ve followed the pattern without making any modifications. From here, the pattern calls for knitting until the foot is 1″ shorter than the desired length. At this point I’m going to do two or three more decrease rounds so the foot circumference fits a little better. Otherwise, I don’t foresee changing anything. I’m an old pro at Kitchener stitch at this point, so it should be smooth sailing now!

Oh, yeah…I got really irritated at the dpns again. Before when that happened I would just put the sock down and knit on my Drachenfels for a bit. However, I’ve now used up all the grey yarn I have and can’t do any more until I get my new order in. So, I just put it on a long circular instead and sort of half learned, half intuited how to do magic loop. It’s really pretty easy and works well. The only thing I’m not a fan of is learning how to adjust the tension when switching off from one needle to the next. You can see on the garter panel here where I started using magic loop instead of dpns:

Haven’t figured out a fix for that, yet. I’ve tried keeping the first stitch of the new section tight, the last stitch of the old section, the second stitch of the new section…nothing so far. Any suggestions? Otherwise I might have to cast on a new project while I’m waiting for my new dpns. Or, (gasp), do some finishing on my UFFOs!

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