Yarn rant

[notyourwendy]

Screw you, Patons Yarns, and your utter inability to make the color or strand wrapping within your dye lots even remotely similar from ball to ball. 

This is the third sock project I've done with Patons Yarns where the two socks are clearly not similar.   Two were out of the Kroy line and while the dye lots may have been good, I couldn't tell because the strand wrapping was so off that it looks like I didn't even buy two of the same colorway, much less two of the same dye lot.  The current project is from the Silk & Bamboo yarn it what would be a lovely plum color, if the dye lot could decide on which shade of plum it would like to be.  I'm willing to bet my next paycheck that the nice spring green color I bought at the same time as the plum is going to have a similar issue.  I'd return it, but I tossed the receipts ages ago and have re-balled the yarn. 

I'd just scrap the current project, but I'm on vacation and have no other yarn with me (oh woe!) so I may as well finish knitting up this mess and, I don't know, make a name for myself as the chick with the mismatched socks, or something.

As an aside to the ranting, can anyone explain or show me some general math on how to work out a gusset heel on toe-up socks?   I can see there's some repeatable ratio from foot stitches to adding gusset stitches, to picking up for the heel, to leg stitches, but I can't work it out on my own.

Comments

[synecdochic]

Wendy Johnson, queen of the toe-up sock, has several free gusset heel basic sock patterns that you can use to base your math on!

[notyourwendy]

I'm working out of her Socks From The Toe Up book and I love it to death. I will poke at her site and see if I can work out something I can comprehend (more my lack of math comprehension than her inability to explain it).

[synecdochic]

That's the book I use too, yeah :)

[hugh_mannity]

I like her short-row heel. It's easy and fits my foot very nicely. It doesn't look bad either :)

[notyourwendy]

I really like her sock stuff in general.

[jumpuphigh]

Vacation is the perfect time to go find a new LYS to explore. :D

[notyourwendy]

And here I was so proud of myself for not going to the LYS on vacation because it would have been a choice between getting home new yarn or dirty clothes and I'm pretty sure the dirty clothes would have lost. :)

[redrose]

Dirty clothes can be mailed!

[mommy]

My favorite toe-up gusset heel is K2Karen's take on the Widdershins heel. It comes with a chart to help adjust for different stitch counts.

[dhae_knight_1]

I have nothing to sau, but embrace the love of mismatched socks. Go all-out; knit two different color socks using the same pattern so people's minds will be blown by trying to reconcile the different colors=mismatch vs same pattern=on purpose?!?

I knit a pair of socks like that, and they never fail to garner comments. :)

[notyourwendy]

I think I'm going to take one from the mismatched blue set and one from the mismatched green set and mix them up.

[pensnest]

Personally I embrace the mismatch, but that's because the only socks I have made so far have been from variegated yarns, and I don't care a bit about finding the right place in the colour to start the socks to match. (What a dreadful sentence, does it make sense at all?)

But if you have to use more than one ball to create your socks, why not start both socks at the same time, and knit the foot from one ball and the upper from the other? Or stripe them?

[notyourwendy]

Two sets were from variegated yarns and I figured that the stripes wouldn't match up and was cool with that. I think what actually went wrong was the strand wrapping, which means that the stripes aren't even the same color..

I didn't do that because I assumed the stripes would work out on their own and then I got past taking the heels apart three times because I kept messing them up and the stripes still didn't appear in one sock and I was so tired of fighting with the heels that I just said screw it and finished the socks. I have a ball winder and the next time I think I'm just going to split the balls in half.

[frotz]

I don't necessarily think of things in the same way as other people, but here's how I think of it; perhaps it will help!

Say you're going along doing the more-or-less cylindrical part of the foot. Say that's 60 stitches, or 30 each on top and bottom.

At some point an inch or two in front of the "foot pit", start adding the gussets to the bottom at whatever ratio works for you. The (an?) important thing here is that however many stitches you add on each side, that's how tall a standard heel flap is going to be. (So, say your bottom now has 50 stitches, that's 20 extra, or ten extra gusset stitches on each side, so your heel flap is going to be ten stitches high.)

Once there's enough gusset, start working on just the center section of the bottom needle(s) (so, just the center 30, ignoring all of the gusset stitches, though you can make it wider or narrower to suit your foot; there's nothing tying you to making the heel flap the same width, and I think narrower works for many) and throw in a few short rows to give the very turn of the heel some shape, and then start working the heel flap back and forth. When you finish each heel flap row, k2tog or whatever with the adjacent gusset stitch, so you're consuming the gusset as you go back up, and working your way back down to the bottom needle(s) having 30 stitches. (If you did a narrower-than-normal heel flap, say just the center 20 out of the 30, then the principle is the same but you're going to have a taller heel flap because now you've got 15 stitches on each side to use up, first the five "extra" center section stitches and then the ten gusset stitches.)

The standard advice is to do the heel flap back up until you get back to the size you started with on the bottom of the foot (so 30 stitches again, with gussets exactly consumed), and it's pretty and symmetric and stuff that way, but if you have wider ankles there's no real reason not to stop with say 40 stitches on the bottom (now back) needle(s) and declare it to be time to start the leg. Watch for holes when you finally join back up with the top/front needle(s).

I'm not an expert at this, but I've been thinking about it a lot; comments about geometry welcome! What's nice about it all is that there are so many easy options for where and how to do the gusset and heel flap that you can suit just about any possible foot. (Of course, the sheer number of options could be considered "more than enough rope".)

[notyourwendy]

That was incredibly helpful. Thank you very much.

[rainne]

Well, that's not annoying at all. Mental note to avoid Patons yarns when possible.

[notyourwendy]

If had just been one set, I probably would have dealt with it. But three sets over two different styles and three different colorways tells me they have a systemic problem.

[rainne]

Yeah. I totally get the annoyance. I'm making up a baby blanket right now with a gorgeous light blue yarn that has two small, very random, VERY DARK gray spots in it. It looks like it's been dropped in motor oil or something! I'm hoping it washes out when I block it. :(

[suncat]

*sigh* Sad to say, it's not just Patons you have to watch out for.

I've seen a pair of socks knit with Brown Sheep Wildfoote where the two skeins (yes, same dye lot, we checked) had the order of the plying different so that the two socks were obviously mis-matched.

Then there was the Crystal Palace variegated yarn that a friend ran into. Here's her blog post, with pictures:

http://silvernthreads.wordpress.com/2010/12/31/after-the-fact/

[notyourwendy]

Well, at least I've learned my lesson not to rely only on dye lot numbers. :(