House Socks - Take One

Knitting house and bed socks are a great post Holiday/TV activity.  It's a quick way to use up all that loud yarn that didn't make it into gifts.  This pair, for instance, worked up over three evenings ... and I wasn't actually knitting like a daemon. 

After a few years of use and some dispirited and faulty darning, I have two pairs of wearable bed socks left . The major problem with those old socks was the short-row heel.  They just don't stand up.  snicker  I don't have a well defined Achilles tendon so it could be that I have a type of heel that doesn't work well with delicate esthetically pleasing sole denouements. 

I turned to Elizabeth Zimmerman's book, Knitting Without Tears, where two types of heel turns are described; the Conventional and the German Heel.  Both are based on a percentage of stitches and either begin work at the dead center where the heel stitches hit the floor, or on the center third.  When you're working on a 20 stitch heel, that means you end up with a lot of decrease bumps and holes smack dab on the bottom of the foot. 

Not only does it let cold floor touch warm heel, it increases the probability that the heel will wear out very quickly.

What I do like about the Zimmerman socks is the idea of knitting Garter Stitch along the edges of the heel flap so that you can physically count the number of rows you've completed (two per ridge), without keeping a running count in your head while you work.  I have other things, like lascivious fantasies, to think about while knitting.  On the other hand, I don't like the four stitch width of that garter stitch on both sides of the Zimmerman heel, and I really prefer using Heel Stitch (knit 1, slip 1 across, purl back) for greater durability.

So I'm going to combine a 2 stitch garter stitch border on the edges of the heel flap with Terri Lee Royea's The Super Simple Knitwit Sock Pattern heel turn, in another pair of cuff-down left-over yarn bed socks.

If you have a favorite toe-up turned-heel sock pattern, please let me know.