Oh my.   I'm showing up in different places these days.  Crafty Corners  asked to feature me in their Best of the Web series.  That was very nice of them.  A certain sister of mine and possibly a certain daughter in law of mine, are really going to enjoy the other featured  pages!  Thanks to Crafty Corners Susan for the invite to become part of it all!

Now on to socks.  

I promised to show repairs to my pretty little socks, so here goes.

 The original gaping maw.  

Because I am going to take the heel out completely, the quickest way to deal with it is to cut it right out.  So a nice sharp scissors and away I go.  I'm leaving a ridge of garter uncut all the way around.  I would hate to accidentally snip the good pretty blue fibres.

There you have it, a different kind of gaping maw.  The next step is to pull off the little loose fibres and weave the last round of white out, leaving nice clean loops of pretty fibre free to be picked up.  

You might worry about dropping stitches, but it just isn't an issue.  At all.  Not even a little.

Because these socks have been worn and washed many times, they have the usual inside fuzziness.  Weaving out that last thread is, in fact, a little bit of a challenge.  Sticky mildy felted inside the sock fibres aren't the only challenge. 

The corners were a little challenge too.  Snarly, messy layered challenges.  Sigh.  It took a little longer than I thought, but finally, I came out of it, with this,

4 needles of nicely picked up stitches, ready for a brand new afterthought heel.  

I don't want to be doing this again, and heaven forbid the heel outlasts the yarn I am knitting into, so I am going to take the time to look carefully at the pretty yarn stitches on the foot of the sock as well.  I want to be sure to be working this new heel into good strong yarn.  This sock looks ok, but I won't actually knit the new heels till I assess the heel and foot of sock 2.  

If the foot of the pretty yarn needs reinforcing, I am planning to do a combination of inside weave and outisde duplicate stitch to give the rest of the sock a life beyond heel one. 

As I said the other day, this heel is easy to replace.  The short row structure of it, means there are live stitches all around, to be picked up.  My favourite afterthought heels are a quick to repair heel too. Live stitches are revealed in exactly the same way. 

I'm not so sure that a heel flap sock would be so easy to repair.  I think it would depend exactly where the holes formed on the foot, and how much reknitting you planned to do.  

I'd stake my life some clever knitter out there has done it.  They would be in good company.  Elizabeth Zimmerman thought about it to the point that she designed socks with a completely replaceable sole.

That is the most interesting thing about knitting. There is always something new to think about, always a new way of looking at something that has been done a thousand times before.

On to sock 2.