Thursday Sockalong: Hermione Heel and a Walk in the Park

It’s Thursday and, friends, I have some sock progress to share!

I was all ready to write another post where I told you all about how I wasn’t making progress on my socks.  I was planning to cast on Asagi last night.  But yesterday was … a day.  And by the time I sat down with a little time to knit, I didn’t have the mental or physical energy to cast on for a new project.  So I pulled out my Hermione sock and had some therapeutic knitting time.

By bedtime, my languishing Hermione cuff had grown into a full leg!  And when the sun woke me up at 6:30 this morning, I thought, hey, I could go ahead and get up, and have a few minutes of porch knitting while I drink my coffee.  So now the heel flap is well under way!

I did have a bit of a heel flap dilemna. (Warning: what follows is some serious sock knitting minutiae — but what is Thursday for, if not discussing sock minutiae!  If it’s not your thing, though, that’s fine! Just skip down to the bottom and look at pretty pictures of a nearby park.)  Now, I haven’t done a pair of top-down socks in awhile.  The heel flap for Hermione is identified in the pattern as a “slightly modified garter-stitch edged Eye of Partridge Heel.”  When I did the first heel flap, I started the instructions just as written, keeping the border stitches of the flap in garter.  After a few rows I thought to myself, “don’t those nubbly little garter bumps look hard to pick up?  Self, you don’t want to wrestle with those bumpy bits.” I had some vague memory of working a selvedge stitch on some past heel flap. I ripped back the flap, and feeling quite pleased with myself (“Way to use your knitting noggin, self!  Don’t blindly follow the pattern, use your knitterly instincts!”), I restarted the heel flap, slipping the first stitch of each row purl-wise and knitting the last stitch of each row through the back loop.  As I progressed, I thought, well-done me!  Look at this lovely row of open v’s, which will be ever so easy to pick up.

Do you see where this is going yet?

It turned out that those lovely little v’s were in fact quite difficult to pick up neatly.  If I picked up the whole stitch, it distorted the heel flap and left giant holes along the gusset.  If I just knit into one leg of the v, I still ended up with loose, holey, gusset stitches.  In the end, I settled for knitting through 1 leg through the back loop, which results in a sort of twisted elongated stitch.  And then I realized that the whole reason for including that garter border on the heel was to make it easier to pick up gusset stitches!  Doh!  (Teaches me, huh? Getting too big for my britches, not following the pattern!)

So anyway, this led to my little dilemna for sock two: work the selvedge on the heel flap, in the interest of the socks matching, or give the garter stitch border a proper go.  In my pre-coffee haze this morning, I decided that the socks matching was oh-so-important, so that I should press on with my mistaken method.  Now, though, with an appropriate amount of caffeine in my system, I’m wondering if that was silly.  How noticeable would it really be if my picked-up gusset stitches didn’t match …  What would you do in a similar situation?

The takeaway from all of this: slipping first stitch as if to purl and knitting last stitch through the back loop is not the right selvedge for heel flaps … at least not for me!

I don’t have much else to report on the sock front.  Except that I have a new little knitting station in my “office” that I’ve been using to take writing breaks.  I’ve been struggling a bit with my work lately, so I’ve gone back to using the Pomodoro method (you can read about it here, but basically, you work for a specified time on a timer, then take enforced breaks).  Since Mr. N is only in LA for the year, the apartment we’re in is a sublet.  The sublettor has this great prop/cushion set up for cross-legged sitting.  It’s becoming my knitting seat for quick breaks from the desk:

Even though it’s not sock related, I thought I’d share some pictures of a spot Mr. N and I went walking yesterday.  It’s a new favorite!  I found myself thinking a lot about the most recent Pomcast (do you listen? I started in NZ and I love it!) which included an interview with Amy Hendrix, founder of Madelinetosh. She spent a lot of time talking about the beauty of brown grass!

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There’s a group of us who write about socks on Thursdays.  If you’d like to join, feel free to link up and let us know.  Go check out what my fellow sock bloggers are writing about:

• Alex at Alexand Knits
• Paula at Spin a Yarn
• Hannah at unsophisticated + jejeune
• Jennifer at A Creative Yarn

Hope you enjoy the rest of your day!  I’ll be back tomorrow trying something new — I do hope you’ll stop by!