Wednesday, January 25, 2012

On Being Naive

"Naive" has a number of connotations...

having or showing unaffected simplicity of nature or absence of artificiality; having or marked by a simple, unaffectedly direct style reflecting little or no formal training or technique.


I'm absolutely thrilled to announce that I have a design and an article in the Spring2012 issue of Interweave's Sockupied e-magazine.

Thrilled!

It's a cabled sock design, with a feature I call my "naive" gusset.

Back when I was living in New York, I was working on my first pair of toe-up socks. Socks being ideal plane knitting, I took the project with me on a flight to Seattle.  It's a long way from New York to Seattle, and I had the centre seat in the back row of Coach. And then women on either side of  me were definitely not knitters. Which meant that when I took off my shoes and socks to try on my WIP, I got some very funny looks.

And then when I realized the sock didn't fit as written, and started frogging it, I got even funnier looks.  The original blog post about this is here... 

The issue was that I've got a high-ish arch, and a straight up non-gusseted short-row heel just doesn't fit me.  If the sock fits snugly in the leg and the foot - which I like! negative ease is good! - then it won't fit around the arch and my heel.

Being stuck on a flight without internet or reference books, I improvised.  I worked some decreases before the heel turn to add a gusset to the foot, and then, after I turned the heel (on the usual number of stitches), I decreased the stitches away. Naive, absolutely.  But it worked brilliantly, and I love how these socks fit.  And I love how they enable a knitter with an arch to take an otherwise great but gusset-less toe-up sock design, and make 'em fit.

This is all outlined in the new Spring 2012 issue of Sockupied, along with a pattern for a cabled sock (slightly asymmetrical, as is my way).

Take a look! Let me know what you think!

1 comment:

TracyKM said...

I don't like short row heels either, but the heel flap toe up patterns out there take a little bit more work than I often want to do, LOL. What I've done in the past is to short row more than 1/2 of the stitches (I think Lucy Neatby makes this recommendation). The other thing I do to get more heel depth is at the top of the heel, I do a few more short rows over most of the heel stitches to raise the back of the heel up to my natural heel crease.