The Next Time You See These Socks . . .

The next time you see these socks, they should have heels. I am still not happy with my attempts at the Sherman heel, so I might be falling back on my old stand-by, short-row heels with wrapped stitches.

I do something a little different on my heel than what most sock knitting directions say to do. Generally they have you work the heel on 50% of the stitches. This makes a heel that is too shallow for my foot, and my heel will drag the ankle or cuff of the sock down. I am always pulling commercial socks up, whether I'm wearing shoes or not.

So I make my sock heels on socks for myself on 70% of the stitches. How did I arrive at that percentage? I measured my feet around the instep, about 9 inches. Then I measured my foot at the heel: 12 inches. Dividing 9 by 12 equals 75%, but I was chicken to knit a sock on three quarters of the stitches. (And that twelve-inch measurement around the heel explains why, when peg-leg pants were in style, I sometimes had such a hard time getting my foot through!)

This makes a sock that looks funny off my foot, after a lifetime of looking at boughten socks, but that fits great. I can put up with looking funny when I'm not wearing it, when in exchange I get a sock that never pulls down, even when I wear them all day long!