Two Pair: Finishing Ends
Hey, somebody… remind me next time not to wait to finish the ends on one pair of sox before finishing a second pair. Ugh. I got so excited that there was a lot of yarn left over from Brian’s Regia Jacquard sox, that I started a pair for myself right away. Brian, being the patient soul that he is, did not mind if his pair would take a little longer because I had not finished the ends yet. Well…
If you use one color for cuff and foot, and another color for heel and toe, you have eight (8) ends to work in, for ONE sock. Sixteen for a pair. And that means that if you have two pair both needing ends finished, you have thirty-two ends.
I don’t mind finishing ends, really, except that I can not read my emails (or other blogs, for that matter) and finish ends at the same time. It would be the perfect task for waiting at the Allergist’s office, except I wanted to take pictures for you folks tonight, and I don’t go to the Allergist until tomorrow.
As I type this, I have three of four sox finished and the fourth is just barely started… that is, the end-finishing of those sox anyway. Funny how we finish them (the knitting) and then we finish them (the ends) a second time, before we can wear them.
I’m pleased with my afterthought heels. They LOOK funny, sort of, as if the heel were stretched out of proportion when I wear them. They look as though I should have snipped the stitches a little closer to the heel than I did. Yet I like my sox to fit snugly in the foot and loose in the cuff (slouchy) and these are good that way. I think if I had gone any looser in the foot, perhaps the sock would have slipped down into the shoe easily. Oh, I did actually make the heel smaller than Dawn’s pattern indicated… I was tired and made a calculation mistake so started decreasing faster maybe 6 rows or so before I “should.” You can see that the part where there normally would be a “heel flap” is much shorter than is typical. It worked anyway, no doubt because I love snug-snug-snug sox.
These feel wonderful. I will have to get used to how they look. I did love knitting them. The idea that I could just knit and knit a tube until I ran out of yarn, and not have to figure out when to start the heel (even most toe-up sox you have to fuss with this detail) until the end…. well, I really enjoyed that. And they fit much better than I would have expected.
Oh, I’m considering picking up some stitches at the top of the cuff of mine and knitting a turquoise rolled edge over the rib. I do love slouchy/baggy cuffs and these qualify, but the rib is a bit larger than I typically knit, and I like the idea of adding more of the brighter turquoise to the top of the sock. I may not end up inspired enough to try it, though. I may be ready to go on to yet another pair of sox. We shall see what mood I am in this week.
Turkish sox use different types of afterthought/peasant heels, and I am fascinated by Turkish sox. I once knit a pseudo-Turkish pair, toe up with a triangular/pointy toe, and with a peasant heel where I used a half-round of waste yarn to mark where the heel would go later. I just used regular sockyarn with none of the signature Turkish sock stranded colorwork, just to try the technique.
That pair is still not done, the heels are not right (I’m sooo close, but that isn’t good enough). For one thing, using the waste-yarn method you have one more stitch on one side of the heel opening than the other side. I didn’t have that problem with the snipping/unpicking of stitches method.
The other factor was my dratted “gauge of the hour” problem. I knit one of the heels in one knitting session, and the other heel at another. Since I was using striped yarn, it was really obvious that the two heels were knit at different gauges. I need to rip out those heels yet again, both of them, and knit them both at a time when I can sit down and have the luxury to knit them at the same time.
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