Friday, May 15, 2009

Too Much of a Good Thing

I had been merrily knitting along on my lime green cotton socks with lace panels. You can see I got the heel turned, and rather prettily, if I may say so. But I had a growing suspicion...

"Growing" sort of being a problem as I had the suspicion that the sock was too long:
I tried the sock on after finishing the heel, and marked the end of my toes with a spare needle. You can see that I have about an inch and a half to spare!
Even in my family of rather large footed women, this sock is a little too much. The pattern said to start the gusset shaping and heel 2 inches before reaching the back of the heel. But obviously I needed about 3.5 inches.

Only one real solution to this problem. Yup: ribbit ribbit. I frogged it out. But not all of it. I took that number, 1.5 inches, and measured back from the start of the gusset shaping:
I marked this spot with a spare needle, ripped out the working needles and tore out all that knitting. It left me with quite a pile of yarn to rewind.

This "do over" at least gives me a chance to correct something I didn't like about the heel. In the following side by side pic you can see both sides of the heel flap.
On the left you can see a nice row of stitches making a vertical pattern of V's up the edge of the heel flap (circled in red for you). On the right is the other side of the heel, and it doesn't match. Now, I realize that you never see both sides of a sock at the same time, but they should still match.

A simple change of a K2tog into a ssk (or any other left-leaning decrease). At first I thought I was correcting the pattern, but when I read it through again I realized that I had misread the pattern in the first place. She uses the left decrease, K2tog through the back loop, but I prefer the ssk. Apparently I missed the "through the back loop" the first time through.

I got the stitches back on the needles and am now about half way up the heel flap again. I should have just enough yarn in the ball to make a nice folded cuff on top. I'll let you know...

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