The First Frankensock of the Year

I thought I'd start off the year with a bang & join a Sock-a-long with the Cabin Fever group. Socks are so much fun!! And I have the remains of hundreds of socks to prove it. Yes, Hundreds. One year, I tried to make a pair of socks every week for the whole year. I ended up knitting 54 pairs of socks that year!!! Mind you, a dozen of those pairs were infant socks but they had to have turned HEELS, so I do count them. But I did knit 42 pairs of Adult socks with turned heels that year as well. The infant socks went to a maternity clinic in a Refugee Camp & had to have heels to keep them from being kicked off by the infants. I don't think I knit anything other than socks that year!!!

While searching for something, I realized I had three full shopping bags & a box full of sock yarn remains. This represents the last 15 years of sock knitting so I shouldn't have been surprised. Since I group my remains into three color groups, Blues, Reds & Pinks/Purples, that makes a bag for each & a box for outsiders. Yes, there are some blacks, greys, browns & even a yellow or orange in there but most of them fall into the three groups. I use greys, black & brown as heels & toes or as solid stripes between wild colors sometimes just to tone them down but mostly everything else falls into my favorite groups. Some of the yarns have multiple colors but I tend to put them where the dominant or brightest color belongs. Makes life easier when putting all the colors into a sock!!

And what do I use for a pattern??? I have a generic pattern firmly embedded in my

brain. It's a cuff or top-down pattern with a K1S1 heel flap & gussets knitted on the side of the flap as I go. I just can't see to pick up those stitches along the side of the flap any more so I learned to add one stitch to each side of the flap every second row as I knit it. You can see the stitches added in the picture. Then I turn the heel the same way you do with a regular knitted flap & short row the gusset increases on each side back to the original number of stitches & carry on knitting the foot. I do a simple decrease on both sides every second row to 20 stitches & three needle bind-off the toe. I love this heel because it allows me to make it deeper or shallower by increasing or decreasing the gusset stitches. I learned early in my sock knitting career that I need a DEEP heel to prevent socks from crawling into my shoes as I walk. No afterthought or short row heel for me.