Sockapaloooza progress

I've been working on my Sockapaloooza socks whenever I have a chance. They're moving along pretty well, once I figured out what to do about the heel.

I started the heel using the toe-up pattern directions, which call for a heel flap (working the gusset part first), but the proportions were not coming out right. So, I ripped back to the start of the gusset, and reknit the foot to work a short-row heel.



I think I made the right decision, since I like how these look. It took a while to get the heels figured out, though. After I tore out the heel flap version, I worked the short row heels, which were good. But, when I started to knit around for the leg, I had a HUGE hole at one side of the heel.

I ripped back to the heel, but ended up dropping some of the short-row wraps, and couldn't figure out how to pick them up properly. I ended up ripping out the whole heel and starting over, since every time i tried to fix something, I made another mistake. Finally, I figured out how to pick up stitches to close the gap well enough, and moved on to the legs.

That's me modeling one of the socks above. The sock is too wide on me, which is a good thing. My feet measure 8" around the ball of the foot, while my pal's are 9.5". I think we both wear a size 8 1/2 shoe, though. Her foot length measures 9.75" -- depending on which chart you read, that's either an 8 or an 8 1/2. So, the length is fine on me, and should be ok for her too, I hope.

The leg is a little looser than I would like. But, I like my socks tight. And, I don't know how wide my pal's ankles and legs are likely to be. I'm hoping that with a generous amount of ribbing on the top, these socks will stay up nicely on my pal's legs.

You might remember that I was afraid of running out of yarn on these socks. I'm happy to report that I don't expect that to happen now.

I have about 12 grams of yarn left for each sock, out of 46. The picture above shows 32 rounds of pattern worked above the short-row heel. I knit the first 16 rounds, measured the yarn, knit another 16, and measured again. Those 16 rounds are about 3 1/4 inches long, and took about 4 grams of yarn. So, I should be safe to knit another 32 rounds (8 grams), plus ribbing, and still have a wee bit of yarn left over. But, I may not even need 32 rounds to get to a good length. We'll see!!