Crystal heels

And yes, before you ask, I did thunk my foot down on the desk at the gallery when no one was looking and took a picture. I’ve been working on a pair of Crystal Socklets from an old issue of Knitty. I’m still on an ankle sock kick, and have some pretty prodigious sock yarn scraps to use up, and I went for a pattern that was all about color. Mine are less bright than the colors used in the pattern, but I had some Heritage Sock Prints lying around with seriously striking colors that I thought might be toned down by some charcoal gray Kroy. Regarding the Heritage, it wasn’t until after the trigger was pulled that I read the reviews and apparently it’s not as superwash as it says on the label and it felts pretty easily.

Of course, me being me, the smart thing to do would be knit a swatch and treat it how I would the finished product, or knit something from it that doesn’t need to be washed often, but me being me I chose to use it in a sock. I figure that using little amounts would lessen the heartache of pulling baby socks out of the washer. Don’t question that logic, It made sense at the time.

This was my first go at an afterthought heel, where stitches intended for the heel (in this case, about half the width of the sock) are knit in waste yarn, then after the rest of the sock is knit you pick up stitches from either side of the waste yarn, then remove the waste yarn and knit the heel from there). It was a little dicey in the low light of the gallery picking up a bunch of stitches in dark colored yarn, but it turned out fine.