A whole bit of sunshine.

My daughter just burst into the house and said "nine months of winter and now it's summer; it's 88 degrees (F) outside." Since it seemed summer would never come, I used a hand-dyed skein of yarn to knit these socks. The photo doesn't quite show the color correctly, at least not on my monitor; the colors are gold and yellow. I figured with the rain and the cold weather we've had these past few weeks, a bit of color was in order. The yarn is one of my daughter's hand-dyed skeins of sock yarn. She;s decided to use them as "sample" socks, to show off her yarn at the various fiber shows. This is fine with me since they are too big for me. The pattern called for 64 stitches. Since I never had knitted a pair of socks with the heel as described in the pattern, I decided to knit it per specification. The sock is part of the Ravelry Group 52 socks in 52 weeks. I know -- insanity!

The pattern can be found here: http://www.jfcampbell.us/anne/patterns/show_off_stranded.pdf

The designer notes in in the pattern: " This is not the standard sock architecture, nor is it one of Cat Bordhi’s. It’s certainly not
mine - I encountered it first in The Tongue River Farm Sock Collection by Katherine Misegades (from 2002). I don’t know whether she originated it or not. This sock has the gusset created as a triangle while the leg pattern continues down the back of the heel."

Now that I've knit the heel, I would decrease the stitches to 60 and increase the triangle for the gusset to 15 stitches instead of 12. This would make the leg fit better and still accommodate my high arch. On the whole, the sock could be knit with a regular heel flap, by adding one stitch on each side for picking up the stitches for the gusset and then decreasing back to 30 stitches for the bottom of the foot.

Nevertheless, it was a fun knit and a new way of making a heel.

Knit on!