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

[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.