Socks and flowers

That's no good. If you think I might live with that by kind of mooshing it into my shoe because it'll kind of meld in eventually, you are wrong. A good blog name occurred to me whilst working on these, The Frog Blog.

Ahh, that's better! Once again, I've lost track on how many times I've knit the heel on a pair of socks. I used short rows every time, but not the same short rows. Here is the tutorial for my new favorite as seen below: Naked short row heels (unwrapped)

Of course now the trick will be to make the shaft fit properly. As a means to that end, I've knit the several rows after the heel without any increases or decreases. I used knits and purls to simulate the pattern. I've also decided to only knit 5 pattern repeats around and knit what would have been the center back repeat in 1x1 ribbing. I'm still undecided about which size needle to use. I'll probably compromise and choose the 2.25 which is the middle size of all the sizes in this sock.

Here is the last pair of socks I knit. I don't have Second Sock Syndrome. Really. I have everything else, but not that. Incidentally, the red ones have the naked short row heel that I linked above.

And for the gardeners: There are some very unusual flowers blooming on my little hill even though I haven't seen any dandelions yet. What are these? The purple ones look like some kind of mum, judging by the leaves, but they're drastically out of season if that is true. I wasn't thinking and I cropped out most of the leaves, but you can see one peeking out from behind a brown leaf at that right of the picture. The flower's closed in the picture, but when they open they are daisy-like and about 1 inch across with a bright yellow center. The white flower is a little closed. It has a bell shape and a large yellow center. The bloom is about 1.25 to 1.5 inches long and 1.5 inches wide. The foliage is fuzzy and you can just see a second stem beginning on the right.