So, as noted in prior posts, one of the things I picked up two weekends ago at Webs was Cat Bordhi's newish book, New Pathways for Sock Knitters, Volume 1. And one of my new projects is a Coriolis sock.

I had heard of the Coriolis pattern, but the pattern I found online when I googled for it seemed to involve knitting with two strands of Trekking XXL and doing odd things with each loop. I liked Trekking XXL, but I didn't want to have to deal with substituting fine sock yarns, and so I passed on the pattern.

(I don't remember why the double strand was important, but I remember that it served an important purpose that couldn't be substituted away. I think that in that pattern, instead of knitting into the front and back of a stitch, the instructions were to knit into each strand of the double strand. If that's the case, I clearly wasn't paying enough attention.)

Well, I have now knit two Coriolis feet and one-and-a-half Coriolis heels. Thank you, gauge denial. But I think I've learned something about socks.

See, the Coriolis pattern is simple. It's actually very similar to the Gibson heel I described in this very blog a little under a year ago. You start toe-up, you knit a tube for the foot; at a certain point, you start increasing; when you have enough stitches and the foot is long enough, you separate the instep stitches, the gusset stitches, and the sole stitches, and you short-row down on the sole to make a rounded heel; then you knit across, and back and forth on the heel, and you slip the first stitch of each heel row, and you ssk or p2tog at the end of each heel row. Eventually you've decreased back to the right number, and you resume knitting in a circle.

This is freaking brilliant. I don't know if it was original with Judy Gibson or not, but it just captures the essence of toe-up socks with a heel flap.

Now, the principal differences between the two:

The Coriolis sock benefits from a toe you can rotate. A lot of the traditional toes - the flat toe, the round toe, the short-row toe - all have a definite instep and sole side. Cat Bordhi recommends a Windmill toe, which is a cousin to the Round Toe but is rotationally symmetric. See, the band spirals around the foot, and if you knit a toe that can't be rotated, depending on your gauge, your band might crash into the side of the heel flap, never to be seen again. If you knit the toe so it can be rotated (or plan ahead well enough, and work out the whole sock ahead of time -- something I'm not averse to doing, but I didn't do it this time), you can avoid this problem and continue the spiral up around the ankle.

The increases on the Coriolis sock are what give it its character. For instance, on one of the two versions of the sock you place a marker two stitches before the end of the instep. Every round you work a kfb in the stitch following the marker; every third round you knit a k2tog a certain number of stitches in front of the marker. This increases 2 stitches every 3 rounds, as opposed to the Gibson heel's increases of 2 stitches every 2 rounds -- so you have to start the increases earlier.

(And you notice that "a certain number of stitches in front of the marker"? Well, it turns out that if you make that certain number 11, you can, in the words of the Yarn Harlot, "whack a cable down the middle of it." So I did, and the cable twining around the foot and ankle is striking. I think I may write it up as a pattern for sale -- comments welcome.)

Oh, and there's a complicated resetting-the-markers round that coincides with the last increase round, so that you rotate the sock so that the band can spiral over the top of the heel. Of all the instructions in the book, this one was the hardest for me to follow until I understood it.

Another big difference is that in the Gibson heel, after short-rowing down, I pick up the wraps and knit them as separate stitches. Cat Bordhi's heel doesn't -- she has you pick them up and knit or purl them together with the stitch they wrapped, in such a way that they're completely invisible from the outside of the sock. Once you've done that, the rest of the heel is just the same in either pattern.

Now, if you've read this far, you may think I'm saying that Cat Bordhi just copied Judy Gibson's sock pattern. That's not really what I'm saying.

Sometimes it takes a genius to look at something we all take for granted and see it for what it really is. Judy Gibson did this, and gave us her "You're Putting Me On" sock pattern, then generalized it for all sizes and gauges. Then Cat Bordhi did it and gave us the Coriolis sock.

Why don't we all look at things we take for granted more often?

So this weekend I'm going to be at a Red Sox game, and I'm either going to score the game or I'm going to knit. I think the latter is more practical.

And I may even be knitting some Red Socks, if I can get one of the current socks on the needles done in time....

I had a good night last night. I finished two socks.

What? No, I didn't start them both last night!

One was a sock from Katherine Misegades's sock booklet for [Tongue River Farm] (http://www.icelandicsheep.com) -- beautiful Fair Isle socks. I've written about these socks before. I bought a "sock kit" at Rhinebeck 2006: three 8-ounce (approximately) hanks of Tongue River Farm Icelandic sock weight yarn in three different "colors" -- natural white, natural brown, natural grey -- and the booklet. It wound up being a slight price break on the yarn, which was beautiful and luxurious, and the sock patterns looked interesting.

Well, the first sock pattern was a doozy. Misegades used a heel construction I wasn't familiar with: when you get to the point at which, on a standard top-down heel flap sock, you'd start working the heel flap. Instead, you work a pattern on the instep and heel, and start working a gusset between them. When you get to what would be the end of the heel flap, you short-row across on the heel, working ssk or p2tog at the end of the row to compensate for the gusset increases, and wrapping the following stitch to prevent holes. To add to this, the colorwork doesn't stop at all -- as you're doing all this complicated stuff to structure the heel, you're also doing all this complicated colorwork.

Because I wasn't familiar with the heel construction, and because it was apparent that all this complicated stuff (some of which I didn't understand) was going on at once, I decided to knit the socks at the size they were designed, even though they almost certainly wouldn't fit me. Well, in February I made a mistake on the heel turn on the second sock, and set it aside for a while. Last weekend I decided to fix the heel, and I ripped it back about two dozen rows (they were short rows, so this is not nearly so drastic as it seems), carefully picked up the stitches, and resumed work. Well, when I left for work yesterday morning I had both socks together -- as you may recall from prior posts, I needed to see the mistakes on the first sock so I could duplicate them on the second sock -- and so when I got off the train at my stop for work I had nothing left to do except work the toe.

So I had been meaning to visit one of the local knitting circles -- I've missed the camaraderie since I moved away from my old one. Well, last night I went to the West Branch of the Somerville Public Library, where Ravelry told me that knitters congregate. And I worked the toe there, and finished it. The knitters admired it, and asked who the socks were for -- and that's when I admitted that I had no idea, and they were going to go to the first person they fit. "Like Cinderella!" one of them crowed. Yes, exactly -- although I'm not going to marry the person the socks fit.

And that gave me such a rush that I immediately picked up my Noro socks and knit furiously on them -- I had made it to the ribbing, working toe-up -- until, just before midnight last night, I tried on the sock, decided that 25 rounds was enough ribbing, as it was approaching the bottom of my calf muscle, and I did not want to deal with shaping and ribbing at the same time. So I bound off the last stitch around 12:30, put on the sock, wore it around for a few minutes, and then went to bed.

And boy, after six hours of knitting, did I ever have strange dreams. The Yarn Harlot was in them, filing a restraining order against me. This is what happens when you watch Judge Judy -- my guilty daytime TV pleasure, from my grad school days, now watched a couple shows at a time thanks to the magic of TiVo -- while knitting. Last night's batch was heavy on the restraining orders and relationship stupidity.

And then, when I got in the shower this morning -- and this is almost certainly because the Fair Isle socks used it as a decrease -- my brain informed me that it understood the difference between the sl 1, k2tog, psso decrease and the sl2tog kwise, k1, p2sso decrease. That's something about being a verbal/symbolic and kinesthetic learner -- sometimes the only way to understand things, if they don't make sense to you visually, and you can't analyze them symbolically, is to do them. I understood that about the heel construction on that sock pattern, but I didn't understand it about the decreases.

This is something of an analysis of the heel Judy Gibson uses in her "You're Putting Me On" socks". A formula follows. Because I want this to be generic, I'm basing all the numbers on the number of stitches around the ankle, but as percentages.

Analysis

The main attraction of this heel is that it resembles a French flap heel quite closely, but knit toe-up rather than top-down. This is a great heel for those of us who like the look of the French flap heel, but like to knit hand-painted yarns toe-up. When you knit a French heel, you knit a flap, then you turn the heel by knitting some short rows, then you pick up stitches on the sides of the heel flap and decrease in a gusset until you reach the right number of stitches to go around the foot.

When you knit the Gibson heel, you do these things in reverse order: you need to increase in a gusset until you reach the rigt number of stitches around, then you turn the heel with short rows, then you knit the heel flap, joining it to the stitches on either side of the foot.

So to make the math analysis work, I'll work backwards. As a rule of thumb, the French heel flap is knit on half the stitches around the leg, and for the same number of rows as there are stitches. Because of the way the joining works, with a ssk or p2tog on either side of the heel flap, you need 150% of the leg stitches on the needles before you start the heel.

Now, that extra 50% needs to be there after the heel turn. If you work wrapped short rows down from the increased stitches, you can work each stitch and its wrap to make two stitches. So you want the increased stitches to be 30% of the leg stitches, and short-rowed down to 10%; that way, the 10% of wrapped stitches on either side will turn into 20%, and so 20% + 10% + 20% = 50%, which is the extra stitches you need.

Recipe

So, instructions. Numbers are given in percentages, but for the less abstract, I'm also giving numbers for a sock based on 64 stitches and a sock based on 80 stitches. The math works most cleanly with socks with a multiple of 10 stitches, but you can fudge the numbers if you know what you're doing and you understand the reasoning above. Notice that the 64-stitch numbers aren't precise percentages, but they work out to give the right number of stitches for the heel flap.

Begin the heel where the foot begins to widen for the ankle. The right side of the foot is the start of the round; the first half of the round is the sole, and the second half is the instep. It helps to place markers at both places.

Work the gusset increases as follows, until you have increased to 130% of the stitches you want around the ankle (84, 104): Round 1: k1, lifted increase to the left, knit to 1 before the end of the sole, lifted increase to the right, k1, k across instep. Round 2: knit around.

Knit across the sole 25% of the stitches (16, 20). Judy Gibson recommends putting the center 30% of the stitches on a single needle at this point, if you're using dpns. Then work the center 30% (20, 24) stitches as follows: Row 1: k to 1 before the end, w&t; Row 2: p to 1 before the end, w&t. Work until you have 10% of the stitches (8, 8) unworked in the center, ending with Row 2.

Knit across the center stitches, and when you reach the wrapped stitches, knit the stitch, then knit the wrap. ssk the last wrap with the next stitch.

Turn the work, sl1, purl across, and when you reach the wrapped stitches, purl the stitch, then purl the wrap. p2tog the last wrap with the next stitch.

You will have 50% of the stitches (32, 40) forming the heel flap. Work the heel flap as follows: Row 1: sl1, knit to 1 before the end of the heel flap, ssk the last stitch with the next stitch, turn. Row 2: sl1, purl to 1 before the end of the heel flap, p2tog the last stitch with the next stitch, turn. Repeat Row 1 and Row 2, ending with Row 2, until you have decreased to the right number of stitches on the needles for the leg.

Abbreviations & Techniques

Lifted increase to the left: Pick up the stitch below the first stitch on the left needle, and knit it through the back loop.

Lifted increase to the right: Pick up the stitch two below the first stitch on the right needle (the stitch below the stitch you just knit into), and knit it through the back loop.

w&t (wrap and turn): Bring the yarn to the front (if knitting) or to the back (if purling). Slip the next stitch as if to purl. Bring the yarn to the back (if knitting) or to the front (if purling). Slip the stitch back to the left needle. Turn the work and continue.

This may be a personal record. I finished the first sock of the pair yesterday, which means I knit a sock in sock weight yarn in five days.

(I didn't blog about it then because Wednesday is game night and I was off gaming, and because yesterday was just a bit fraught for other reasons previously mentioned. Things are settling down, and the universe is working out its perversity in ways that I'll probably mention here when they're less up in the air.)

Unfortunately, the digital camera is not cooperating at the moment. I am going to blame the batteries, since it's been flashing a low-battery icon at me; but it's probably operator error. Once the batteries are recharged I'll make another attempt at taking a non-blurry photograph that doesn't reveal too much of the clutter surrounding my knitting nest.

So, capsule review time, since the point of this whole exercise was not just to have a sock at the end of it, but to try a new yarn, a new cast-on technique for toe-up socks, and a new heel construction technique. I'll take these one at a time.

The yarn: I am just as pleased with the colors and patterning of the yarn now that it is knit into a sock as I was when I first saw the hank. The choice of colors and the proportion are great, and match the pictures on the site. The yarn was mostly pleasant to work with, though it was unnervingly splitty. One of the things I like about plain socks is that, aside from the toe and heel shaping and the ribbing, I can mostly knit by touch; what I found with this yarn was that that was dangerous, as I could very easily pick up only 2 or 3 of the plies with the right needle, or catch only 2 or 3 strands of the yarn before pulling it through. I think (I hope) I caught this on the following round each time.

I'm currently in the process of rationalizing the acquisition of similar yarns from Knitivity, though that may need to wait until other issues play themselve out. It's not like I'm in danger of running out of stash in the next few weeks months years.

The Turkish cast-on: I don't think I like this as much as Judy Becker's magic toe-up cast-on; it was more fiddly to work, and didn't produce as nice of a toe. Some of that may just be because it's the first time I tried it, so I may try it on a few more socks.

Judy GIbson's reverse flap heel: This, on the other hand, is @#$%ing brilliant. It is my new favorite heel type. I'm going to meditate on it for a while until I completely understand how the numbers work out, and then make a detailed technique blog post on it.

Stay tuned for photos.

When we last left our noble adventurer, he was about to begin the sock heel.

When you work an ordinary French heel, you knit the heel flap, then you wrangle some short rows to wind up with a roundish heel, then you pick up stitches on the side, then you work decreases to narrow the sock down for the foot.

When you work the heel from [Judy Gibson's "You're Putting Me On" pattern] (http://tiajudy.com/putmeon.htm), you work increases to widen the sock for the ankle, then you narrow the sole for the heel with ssk and p2tog, then you pick up stitches on the sides of the heel, then you knit the heel flap, joining it to the live stitches that you increased.

So I got through the increases just fine. The pattern uses left-leaning and right-leaning lifted increases along the sole -- the ankle gusset. And I got through the narrowing of the sole right under the heel. But when I got to the point where I was supposed to pick up stitches, I went off the rails. (Remember, sometimes I'm a designer. This is a euphemistic way of saying I can't look at a pattern without feeling the compulsion to change it.)

So I ripped out the part of the sock heel where it narrowed, what Judy Gibson calls the "heel extension." The sock was built on 80 stitches, and there were 12 increase rows, so I had to decrease 24 stitches down to 8, then pick up 15 on each side. Instead, I short-rowed from 24 down to 8, with wraps, as if I were working a short row heel, and then instead of picking up 15, I knit the wrapped stitch and then the wrap. There were 8 wrapped stitches on each side of the center of the heel, which meant that instead of picking up 15 on each side of the heel, I had 16 live stitches on each side of the center of the heel. The difference between 15 and 16 meant that the heel flap would wind up being 2 rows longer, but I didn't think that would be a big problem.

I must admit, I really like the way this sock is turning out. I like knitting toe-up socks in order to make sure I use up all I have of a hand-dyed or self-striping yarn, but I really don't like the way short row heels look with hand-dyed or self-striping yarn, which kind of defeats the purpose. This sock construction technique means I get the best of both worlds -- the heel flap construction and using all the yarn.

I also find myself, to my chagrin, planning my next pair of Knitivity socks. Maybe if I let Himself pick out the color and let him think the socks are for him, he won't give me too much grief about the ever-expanding stash....

(And yes, Himself, I know you read this blog. If you see a color you like, speak up.)

EDIT: This heel construction was recommended to me in the first place by Ariannah Armstrong, a Socknitters list and chat regular, who has a blog at http://ec.lecti.ca/ -- I can't claim all the credit!

I have been making progress on the Knitivity sock, but nothing worth photographing yet. So I figured I'd start posting some of the recipes I use for making socks.

This is my favorite toe for my own feet; it fits better than any other toe. (The flat toe, which I'll talk about in another post, also fits well.)

First, you need to figure out how many stitches you need to go around the ball of your foot. One of the advantages of some toe techniques is that you can just start knitting and work out as you go how you are going to increase; this isn't one of them.

Now, the hard math part. You need to figure out what numbers to multiply to get that. One number is the number of stitches you'll cast on, and the other number is one more than the number of increase rows you'll work. The number you cast on should be even, and if it's divisible by 4, you can work a round where you increase only half as much. The second number shouldn't be much more than 8 for sock weight yarns, or 6 for DK or worsted weight yarns.

So, for instance, suppose we need 80 stitches around. That's casting on 10, with 7 increase rounds. 10 x 8 = 80.

Or, suppose we need 64 stitches around. That's casting on 8, with 7 increase rounds. 8 x 8 = 64.

Or, suppose we need 48 stitches around, on a DK weight sock. That's casting on 8, working 5 increase rounds. 8 x 6 = 48.

Hopefully you get the picture.

Now, suppose you need 78 stitches. That's casting on 12, with 5 increase rounds (6 x 12 = 72) and one half-increase round (plus 6 stitches).

So you cast on the appropriate number of stitches, using the figure 8 cast on, the magic toe-up cast on, or the Turkish cast on. Then you work 1 round plain, 1 round of *(k1, M1)*.

Then you work 2 rounds plain, 1 round of *(k2, M1)*.

Then you work 3 rounds plain, 1 round of *(k3, M1)*.

Then you work 4 rounds plain, 1 round of *(k4, M1)*.

See the pattern here? You work a number of plain rounds, then one round of k the same number, M1, repeated across.

If you have to work a half-round, you skip every other increase in one of the increase rounds, usually the last one.

And there you have a round toe.

As far as the M1 goes -- I like the raised increase. You can work any increase you like that doesn't make a hole (or, if you want a lacy look, you can work a YO, but I think that would look weird). And if you work a bar increase, you'll get odd bars here and there, but you knew that because that's why it's called a bar increase.