I should be halfway through the foot of my Chuck’s Cabled Sock by now, but I took a small timeout to give some extra attention to the heel. As written, the heel flap is in a bi-color diamond pattern, but the instructions indicate that the background color should be broken at the start of the short rows and the turn knit entirely in the contrast color. I wasn’t thrilled with the look of it once I saw it and I wondered if there was another option. The pictures of the sock in the pattern don’t really show the heel very well, so it’s hard for me to get a sense of how the blue heel would look as part of the completed sock.

I thought that I would like it better if the pattern carried on through the heel turn, so I took a whack at it! I’m really pleased with how it turned out, particularly the way that the little brown diamond carries right through the center of the turn. I stopped here to take pictures (you can tell I was excited by the number of pictures I took, please bear with me!), so I’ll have to let you know if there are any issues with this as I pick up the stitches for the gussets and carry on. (click for big versions of the pics!)

I also did my own little study in yarn dominance with the heel flap. In the first shot below you can see (maybe!) a subtle line of demarcation, a difference that you can see even more clearly on the wrong side of the work. I knit the first half of the heel with the brown yarn in my left hand on both the right side and wrong side of the work and noticed a difference between the knit and purl rows. I realized that this was my first practice in knitting fair-isle back & forth instead of in the round, I had just assumed that it would be the same and I would continue to keep the same yarn in the same hand whether working on the right or wrong side. For the second half of the heel I switched hands for the right and wrong side (brown in left and blue in right for the wrong side and blue in left and brown in right for the right side). The third shot shows the heel re-worked switching hands the entire way. The difference is pretty subtle, but I can see it, so I’m glad that I went back and fixed it. This was great practice too - I’m a real learn-by-doing (and making mistakes so that I have to fix them!) type of person. I won’t elaborate too much on yarn dominance, others (like the awesome Nona) have written about it at length and there are some great resources out there.

I can’t wait to finish this sock!!