Monday, January 24, 2011

What a heel

It is scary how fast you can knit a sock if you're not putting in any sort of pattern:

This is what my latest Biscotte socks looked like yesterday, just one week after getting them started. Usually it takes me a month minimum to get a pair done, and here I am at both heels!

If I weren't trying to design my own heel, I would be done by now. What you're seeing there is I think the fourth try on sock #1, tentatively approved and still to be tested on sock #2. Amazingly, though the actual turning took so much effort, I got the length of the foot right on the first try, mostly by guessing. Go me!

I was less scrupulous about perfection about ten seconds into the gusset of sock #2 when I discovered I had missed half of an increase row and had been two stitches short for the entire foot. (we'll just ignore the fact that had I not been so lazy about putting in a pattern, I would have noticed the mistake much sooner.) Instead of frogging I sort of scratched my nose and discreetly added in the stitches as I carried on.

The custom heel isn't terribly special. It incorporates a different increase method than you usually see - probably because it turns out not to look 100% beautiful in this environment even though it does eliminate any chance of tiny holes - and the increases happen at a slightly different time than you usually see because changing that makes it easier for me to remember to do them.

Side benefit: by taking apart heel construction and reassembling it so that I understand what happens where and when and why, I think I finally get the logic behind the math for a toe-up heel.

And just in time, because instead of knitting these lovely warmer-weather socks, I should be working on my mohair blend boot socks which have a different number of stitches. Yesterday was -17 degrees C without the windchill (with, it was -27, I think) and even as I type this there are thin, dry pellets descending onto the crusty snow below. Now that I've finally got my math right, maybe my super warm socks will go faster.

Even though I am putting a pattern into them.

2 comments:

Kathleen Taylor said...

Sometimes I am being lazy when I knit plain socks. But sometimes, plain is the best way to show the yarn off. And if it's the former, you can still always pretend that it's the latter.

heklica said...

In my mother tongue there's an expression 'dragon woman', with an appreciative meaning of 'a woman who is capable and fearless and can do pretty much everything'. You are fearless! You are a dragon woman! :)