Rye Socks + Knitting Heels.

My Socktober socks are ready. All three pairs of them. I used tincanknits' Rye Sock pattern for them, and made a pair for each member of our little family. I would really like to recommend this sock pattern: the fit is great (Magnus thinks these are the best fitting woolen socks he has ever had), they were quite easy and fast to knit, and they look really good. And the pattern is freely available for download via Ravelry.

A while back I posted a question asking your help for knitting heels. I had problems with picking the stitches from the sides of the heel flaps because I thought they were loose and little holes appeared at the sides of the gussets because of it. I had tried to pull the stitches at the beginning of each heel flap row really tight and then knit the picked stitches through the back loop (twisting them) to make them even tighter but it didn't give me a satisfactory result. You guys had many great tips and I already tried some of them. 

First thing I tried was not slipping the first stitches of each heel flap row. You can see the difference that little adjustment made to my heels in the photo below. 

The one on the left is the first one I made and the on on the right was knitted without the slipped stitches. The beginning of the gusset looks already much better, but I still thought the stitches I picked were on the loose side.

So next thing I tried was picking the stitches on the wrong side as suggested by Ryyni from Lankaterapiaa blog. She knits the prettiest socks so I thought she must know her stuff, and boy, did her tip make all the difference! This is the youtube video she told me to watch: 

I must say my heels have never look as good as after knitting them the way they show in this video! Next time I'll remember to slip the first stitches of each heel flap row though, because now the beginning of the gusset is almost too tight... I still have to try the fish kiss lips heel! I need to see if it really is as easy as you guys say it is!

We had a Christening party for the baby last weekend. In Finland it's not customary to give babies their names before they are some 2 months old; for us it took a little longer because we have family overseas so we had to find a date that worked for everyone. So the baby is now called Theo August. The middle name August comes from the fact that me and my husband started to date in August, we got married in August and the baby was born in August - so we thought the name would be perfect for him. It also means magnificent which works fine for us as well :)

And as always, as soon as I turned my back, Luna had claimed the ownership of my socks. She thinks I only knit for her. We need to have a little discussion about it. Soon.