So, while I haven’t been blogging much in the past week or so, I really have been busy.

One of the things I’ve been working on is a sock pattern for my friend Deb, whose blog lives over at www.fearlessfibers.blogspot.com.  She dyes bee-you-tee-full yarn and sells it on Etsy  – which if you haven’t visited is a very fun place — her shop is at http://fearlessfibers.etsy.com.

Anyway, her "Humility" colorway is coming up in the shop next month, and she asked me to do a toe-up sock pattern to go with it.  So, I’m doing a (much better) version of DH’s Japanese twisted rib socks.  And here’s a sneak peek at its lovely subtlety:

Now, I have my favorite sock knitting techniques, just as most independent-thinking knitters do.  I like the Judy Becker cast-on – although I don’t relish calling it "magic", because it isn’t.  (And for the life of me I don’t know why anyone would not wrap the yarn the proper way on both needles in the first place; it’s just as easy and no backwards sts to contend with on the first round, so I do it that way.)

And, I like Priscilla Gibson-Roberts’ toe increase method of "make 1, YO", which I learned out of "Ethnic Socks & Stockings", primarily because it is extremely easy to keep track of what you are doing – although again, I think it is not well-named, because a "make 1" is usually considered to be a distinct increase method, whereas PGR uses it here to refer to the act of knitting an existing YO tbl.

So far, no problems, except for my personal ones about nomenclature.  I got the sample sock halfway knitted.  Then, I got to the HEEL.

I don’t have a favorite sock heel.  I don’t really like flap-and-gusset heels much, for some reason — I think I just find them inelegant.  And EZ’s Afterthought heel isn’t inelegant, but that heel style doesn’t seem to fit me all that well.

Which led me into the morass which is SHORT ROW HEELS.

OK, admittedly there are a lot LOT LOT of blog posts out there about short row heels, and here’s mine.  So what?  Why should you read this one?  After all, it’s incredibly long.

Well, given my peculiar engineering background, and thus my analytical approach to knitting, I expect it is going to be a bit different from most of what’s out there.  I also expect it to be exhaustive exhausting thorough, educational, and breathtaking in its clarity.  And there’s lots of pictures.

Short rows - in general

Short rows, after all, are not limited to sock heels.  So, generally speaking, the three main methods of closing the gap on short rows include:

1. wrap & turn — by far the most common
2. YO method — second most popular
3. Japanese, or what Montse Stanley calls the "catch" method

Here’s the shocker:  actually, all of these methods end up being the same structure.

In all cases, no matter what the heck else you have done, the structure of a piece of knitting wherein one has turned around mid-row looks like this:

(I have tried to differentiate rows here by using several shades of gray).

The gaps that needs to be closed are shown with sadly scrawny little arrows:

In all three methods of closing that gap, the bit of yarn on each short row that is going to get hooked up with the base row is this bit in red:

And the stitch in the base row it’s going to hook up with is in pink:

Effectively, the pink st in the base row is going to be hauled up a row, to be merged with the red bit in the short row above.

Now, it makes no never mind whether you: 

(a) wrap the st adjacent to the turn, and work the wrap with that st on the next pass;

(b) make a YO, either backwards or normal, to be worked with the adjacent st; or

(c) put a safety pin on the working yarn to mark that bit temporarily, and pick it up later to work it with the adjacent st.

The end result is EXACTLY THE SAME STRUCTURE.  The red bit is the wrap, the YO, or the part you pick up, and it gets worked with the pink st in all three cases.

Of course, that’s not to say that they give exactly the same results.  Each of those three options allocates a different amount of yarn to that red bit, which means some are looser and some are tighter.  Without carrying out exhaustive tests, my educated guess is that the YO is the loosest, the wrap is in the middle, and the pick-up-later is the tightest.

Now, there is one more option:  whether the red bit is worked so that it is twisted, or not.  Here’s what I mean by twisted:

I’ll use the wrap & turn method to illustrate this principle, since it is by far the most common method.

A stitch can be wrapped two ways:  either clockwise (CW) or counter-clockwise (CCW).  The act of wrapping involves moving two things — one is moving the working yarn from one side of the work to the other (and back), and the other is moving the stitch to be wrapped from one needle to the other (and back).  The order of those two things determines whether your wrap is CW or CCW.

That, plus how the wrap is subsequently picked up (i.e. from which side of the work — usually the RS or knit side), determines whether your wrap ends up twisted, or not twisted.

BTW, note that the st that is being wrapped is always slipped purlwise, so it doesn’t twist.  I know Cat Bordhi’s video on youtube says knitwise, but she also hauls the wrap over the st first and then works the st & the wrap tog tbl, and frankly, all those extra shenanigans aren’t really necessary.  If you do things right, and give the knitting a good tug if necessary, the wrap should duck out of sight in the back because that’s where it wants to be anyway.

 Here is a table with a lot more info in it than anyone will ever read.  Suggestion:  Skip this if it makes your eyes cross.

The short version is this:  whether knitting or purling, if you MOVE THE YARN FIRST before moving the st, the working yarn does not cross over itself in the wrap; when you pick up the wrap from the knit side of the work, YOUR WRAP WILL END UP TWISTED on the purl side.

If instead you MOVE THE ST FIRST, the working yarn does cross over itself in the wrap; when you pick up the wrap from the knit side, YOUR WRAP WILL END UP UNTWISTED on the purl side.

I lied.  There is yet one more option.  That is whether to slip the first st after the turn, or work it.  Many authorities say to slip the first st after you do the turning around part, in order to minimize the 2-row "step" being created by the partial row.  I don’t buy it, and here’s why:

In these bizarre interesting drawings, the "swatch" without slipped sts is on the left, and the one with slipped sts is on the right.  In the red final rows, the 2-row steps have green arrows, while 1-row steps have black arrows.

Basically, as far as I can tell without doing any actual knitting, all it does is change where the 2-row step is.  It buys you something the first time you do it on each side, but every susbsequent time it doesn’t.  Since you’ve already moved that end st "down" a row by not working it, the next time you meet it, even though you also move the new end st "down" a row, they are still going to be two rows apart.

So, maybe that doesn’t make a heck of a lot of difference — but the other undesirable effect this has is to create a longer float on the WS of the work, behind that slipped st.  Uh-uh.

Short rows - specifically sock heels

OK, so what the heck does all this mean in the world of sock heels?

Well, I went and knit a whole bunch of different ones I found in my library, and online in various blogs and zines.  I’m not kidding:  I have a bag with literally a dozen-and-a-half different short row sock heels in it, with accompanying documentation.  And that’s not counting the ones I ripped out.  (I told you I’d been busy.  Think of all the work I’ve saved you.)

Here is a summary of what I found about the wrap-’n'-turn ones:

Rule #1 - Caveat Emptor.  As with most stuff online, consider the source — but be aware that even a respected source is no guarantee of accuracy or suitability. 

• Many were very specific about how to do the wraps, and less than specific about how to do the the picking up of the wraps. 
• Most used double wraps, where sts get wrapped twice, once on the way down and again on the way up. 
• Most used twisted wraps.

Most of the ones I found look pretty good on the left side of the heel (the knit side of the wrap & turn) — but the right sides of the heels had varying degrees of success.  I found some that had twisted wraps on one side of the heel and untwisted wraps on the other side.  I found one in a popular online knitting zine that, when I religiously did exactly what I thought it was saying to do, told me to twist the wrap AND the stitch — on one side only – looked awful.  I found one that had weird decreases, one that only wrapped once, one that appeared to be Japanese-style, but wasn’t.  Tried ‘em all, but none of these looked very good.

 I don’t think continually messing around with the st mounts makes for a neat heel.  Once again I tried PGR’s YO / backwards YO thing, and once again I tried the purl encroachment one.  I’ve tried both of these before and wasn’t any happier with them this time around.  Too fiddly, for my time & money, and they still don’t look that great. 

 I was in doubt as to whether a twisted wrap vs. an untwisted wrap would make a huge difference, other than I expected the twisted one to be a little tighter and thus neater-looking.  I was wrong on both counts.   Drum roll, please….  the very best looking one, IMHO, is an absolute plain vanilla one which uses double UNTWISTED wraps, and no slipping of the first st after the turn. 

Surprised?  So was I.  I thought for sure that twisted wraps would be tighter and better-looking, but they weren’t.  Find this gem in this whole-sock tutorial at http://www.hellchick.net/needles/patterns/toeupsocks.shtml.

Well.  This post is way, way too long as it is, so I’ll just have to wait to tell you what ELSE I found…  and what I decided to use on the Japanese sock… yes, now I DO have a favorite sock heel!  I’ll tell you all about it soon, I promise.