liar, liar, socks on fire!

i don't get it. what's all the fuss about knitting socks? the difficulty, i mean. so far so good. as you can see from the photo at the left, i made good progress this weekend.

i used the standard Slip 1, Knit 1 row followed by a Slip 1, Purl 1 row pattern for the heel flap. this is really neat because it makes a double layered fabric for the heel flap so it is nice and strong and reinforced. the socks kika's grandmother made for me are not made this way, and i want to figure out her method when i make myself a pair of worsted weight socks.

why would i want to switch to worsted after conquering real sock weight yarn? well... i pulled the kika grandma socks out of the wash today, and one of them is starting to get a hole in the heel, and the toe is sort of going too. grandma uses the decrease to 4 stitches and then thread through the live stitches and pull tight method of closing the toe rather than grafting. seeing this method wear out has made me decide i need to graft the toe on my lovingly constructed socks.

now to be fair to the grandma socks, i have been very hard on them for the three years i have owned them. they are too thick to wear in shoes, so i wear them as slippers. they start to stretch after a few wears, so i toss them in the wash, and because they are made of good sturdy eastern european acrylic yarn, i just toss them in the dryer to re-shrink them.

anyway, back to the sock at hand.
look at the pretty turned heel! ha! people have told me how hard it is to turn a heel. um. not really. you only need to know how to knit, purl, and decrease. easy easy. i'm more concerned about picking up the gussets and getting all of my stitches back on to four needles without a disaster visiting itself upon my constructed heel.

keep your fingers crossed.