Musings on sock heels

I'm currently obsessed with Birgit Freyer's slip stitch helical socks. I bought a book of six patterns, and plan to make at least two of them for Leon and a couple for me. i started with the Xara socks. They are a marvellous confection of 1 x 1 cables, helical stripes and fun!

They are a very good way to use up partial skeins of yarn, and you know how I love to use leftovers. They do lack stretch in the leg, which is why this pattern calls for 80 stitches in the leg.

it's a German pattern, and is very well thought and and well written and also suggests you use whatever heel and toe you like best. For this first pair, I went with the heel-flap and gusset. It's my go-to. I've tried a lot of different heels and always come back to this, because it just seems to fit best.

in the past I've used an afterthought heel, a sweet tomato heel, fish lips kiss, hat heel, fork in the road heel, Crystal heel, you name it. I seem to have used the most variety on sneaker liners, which is interesting, since they suffer most from the lack of depth when you don't use a flap, and i wear them with bike shoes, which come up relatively high on the heel.

So, just use a heel-flap and gusset, right? But on stripy socks, it interrupts the pattern, see:

Sometimes I like a contrast heel and toe, but I think these are better served by continuing the stripe pattern.

So when I saw Sarah Jordan's SHaG pattern and thought it would do nicely. It combines a heel flap and gusset, knit in the round, with only a bit of back and forth under the foot. Genius, and so simple I've done it once and know it off by heart. I'm trying them out on these sneaker liners, and it is so tidy and simple.

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Geogradiant MKAL Part 1 - that was unexpected (spoilers)

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What I made, by Sharon

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