I haven’t finished the baby socks yet. Life keeps getting in the way of my knitting. grrrrrrr I’m almost to the heels, though. And they’re so tiny, that it won’t take any time to get those heels turned.

Speaking of heels, Kristina asks:

I am a toe upper, too! I would love to know how you did the Beautiful Plum Cable heel. It turned out absolutely fabulous!

Thanks! As I mentioned when I finished the plum Beehive Cabled Socks, it wasn’t a heel I had much experience with, being a mostly toe-up sock knitter, but I was really pleased with my unvention of it by knitting a top-down heel backwards. It’s similar to some of the toe-up heel flaps that have been featured in knitty.com patterns lately, but mine is a little different.

The heel turn uses increases to fill the gaps left by the short rows, so there are no wraps and yet no holes. You can find the heel construction in my free patterns Tangled Up In Blue socks and Snake River Socks. Both of these patterns use a k2-sl2 pattern on the heel flap, but you can knit the flap in any stitch pattern. The plum socks have a standard k1-sl1 heel stitch on the flap. The latter have a garter-stitch border on the heel flap, so the melding of the heel flap to the gussets is very slightly different. But check those two patterns out, and you’ll know all my secrets.

The reason that I was so pleased to unvent this method is because I hate doing short rows with wraps because my wraps always looked wonky. And, yes, I’ve tried all of the wrap methods. They all looked wonky. So having a way to do a standard heel flap that actually looks exactly like a standard heel flap but without a wrap in sight was, to me, very cool.

At Cat Bordhi’s Magical Moebius Festival this spring, Cat taught me how to do wraps the correct way. So I do know how to do them now and they don’t look wonky at all. And Cat is such a wonderful person! She refrained from adding you idiot — you can invent bizzaro ways to cast on and yet you can’t managed to do a short-row wrap without it looking wonky? She simply showed me how and smiled knowingly and kindly. And the little lightbulb went on over my head and now I get it. But I’d still rather not, you know. Do short rows with wraps, that is. I’m glad I get it finally.

And it just goes to show you that you can knit for a long, long time and there are still new things to learn.