Heel we go

One of my goals for this pair of socks is to avoid having holes at the ankle. Via the Ravelry wiki I checked out a help page on pickup up stitches and got good advice on spacing them out. I'm not sure how to differentiate between loops and bumps in selvage edges--they all look like loops to me--but it made sense to pick up two of them and then skip one before picking up two more.

I turned the heel and started shaping the gusset while doing some secret knitting at the office. I felt pretty good about how the picked up stitches went, but as I look at the sock now, at least one of the sides is going to have that gap. Hmm. Well, there's another one to go yet.

I can also see that I should have been picking up the stitches through two loops. Going through just one loop looks to have left some small holes. It's not the end of the world or anything, but I wish I would have done better. Sure, I could rip out and do it again, but that won't be happening. My knitting is fine functionally. This is merely a picky thing about appearance.

And oh that appearance. I'm happy with how the socks look and how the variegated yarn is knitting up. Part of my initial resistance to knitting socks was that the FO examples I saw were usually bright, crazy colors that I wouldn't wear and wouldn't go with my clothes, and the zebra-like striping of my first pair didn't exactly thrill me. I wouldn't call this WIP "beautiful". The color palette is too subdued for that adjective to apply, in my mind. Maybe "sharp" or "smart" are better descriptors. Whatever the word, I like it.