…and now we return to our regularly scheduled programming

I finished the sweater!  It’s still drying after being blocked, so I don’t have any photos to share – yet.

I picked up the Culture Socks again, which I hadn’t touched since casting on back on January 2.  They are cruising along.  It is hard to get used to how they look.  They are not stretchy at all, so they look HUGE.  I keep putting them on my feet to make sure they are not huge, and they aren’t… but they look huge.

I finished the first leg yesterday and have rearranged the stitches to begin the heel flap.  The green-pink-green-pink-green stripes that you see in the middle run right down the back of the sock, and then continue (and expand) into the heel flap.  This is HARD!

Let me remind you where we’re headed.  See how those racing stripes expand as the heel flap grows, and the section of pattern stitch on either side gets smaller?  (This is Elinor’s photo from the pattern page.)

Achieving this is a bit of a mindbender.  The racing stripes used to be at the very beginning and end of each round.  So now that I’m knitting back and forth, I’m not on the same line of the stitch pattern.  For the pattern to the right of the stripes, I’m on one line.  Then to the left of the stripes, I’m on another line.  And I have to figure out how to read it backwards on the wrong side rows.  It took me about an hour to knit the first 4 rows of the heel flap last night.  I finally put it away.  Oy!

Those racing stripes in my sock (one of my two needle juncture points) aren’t super tidy.  I’m hoping blocking will help.  They  Here’s the other side, which is even messier at the join:

I’m not super worried about it yet, mostly due to the Yarn Harlot’s recent post about just this very thing.  That was well-timed and very comforting to me, Stephanie!