FO: Ornaments Socks (Afterthought Heel)
I can't get over how pretty my feet are in these socks.In fact, I was so in love with the first one that I wore it while knitting the second (and a random Smartwool sock on the other foot, which was not nearly as warm or wonderful.After a long hiatus of not knitting socks for myself (for no good reason), I picked up a few skeins of pretty self-striping and have gotten to work. Enabled by Instagram, it felt a little bit like a rite of passage to stalk an Etsy update for the first time and purchase this gorgeous skein of Gynx Yarns Power Sock in the Ornaments colorway.I then had way more fun than I ever expected hand-winding the ball so that the stripey bits were isolated, which served no useful purpose whatsoever, other than to make me happy.In the spirit of my goals for myself this year, I decided to do my first afterthought heel, which seemed like a great idea, given the self-striping nature of the yarn. The afterthought heel makes it so that the stripes don't get interrupted on the foot, as they would if you knit a traditional heel flap. You knit a giant tube with a bit of waste yarn where you want the heel to go. You finish off the toe, then go back and pick out the waste yarn and knit was is basically another toe to accommodate the heel. Sounds like it wouldn't fit right, but it does. I loosely followed the AfterThought Heel Socks pattern by Laura Linneman, a free Ravelry download. Again, I can't get over how much I love my feet when they are in these socks.One change I made was to the beginning - even though the yarn is the star here, and you really don't want anything fancy at all going on to distract from the stripes, I felt I needed *something.* My brain kept seeing a picot edge at the top, but I also wanted ribbing to make the sock stay up, and I didn't know how those would play together. Swatching a bit led me to believe it would be okay. To start my sock, I cast on, knit a few rounds in stockinette, did a round of repeating (k2tog, yo) all the way around, a couple more rounds of stockinette (which ended up being indistinguishable from the ribbing, as I had hoped), then switched to ribbing. After I had gone the same number of rounds after the picot round as I had before, I folded the sock at that point (thus making that k2tog, yo round into cute little picot edging bumps) and worked a round where every new stitch was worked into both the stitch below and a cast-on round stitch. It was fiddly. With a folded picot edge, you have two options - you can do a round like this, where every stitch is worked into two and tacks down the folded edge... or you can wait to the end and sew the folded edge down. I hate finishing, thus my choice was clear. Here are my pictures of the process, but Craftsy.com has a great tutorial that's probably much clearer than my explanation.After folding my edge, I worked some more ribbing, then switched to stockinette to whoosh down the leg and foot and display those stripes in all their glory. Although the top cuff of the sock looks *okay,* and although it will most often be hidden by pants legs, I wish I had done the foldover to encompass the entire ribbing section. I would like one uniform section for the sock cuff instead of the weird bisected one I have. Oh, well.The other hiccup was when I got about halfway through the toe of the first sock and looked down at the waste yarn (where the heel would go) and realized that I had the toe and heel perpendicular to each other - so unless my heel was going to be on the side of my foot or my toes were going to align vertically instead of horizontally, the sock was not going to fit. Even though it meant frogging a bit, this mistake really made me laugh, especially since it was easily remedied. I used about 3/4 of the skein for these socks, so I'm using some of the leftover to knit more infant tube socks for the baby that is DUE TODAY. (Seriously, kid. Anytime you want to make an appearance is fine.)Finally, I'm putting these in the My Sister's Knitter Stash Down KAL thread here and sub-KAL (which focuses on using sock yarn in January) here. It's nice to start out the year with some new, cozy socks (especially since I plan to spend the next several weeks exclusively in PJs, once this tardy child shows up).