I feel dirty and sacrilegious just having thought of that title.  However, after hours of knitting and ripping my latest sock attempt, I hope you can forgive me.  I’ve been coveting the book New Pathways for Sock Knitters: Book One for a while now.  I thought I’d wait patiently for a used copy, but then I finally saw the book in person at Arizona Knitting and Needlepoint.  After looking through it I realized I need this book now…  especially since the yummy new yarn I just bought was destined to become socks.  All I needed was an exciting new technique to bring them alive.

I flipped through the book and settled on the Coriolis architecture.  After all, “hand- painted yarns throw their colors at an angle in the Coriolis band, looking stunning” which sounded just perfect for my Hacho.  And it is…just look at that lovely little band of goodness.  One problem.  The sock didn’t fit at all.  Just a little too wide and already WAY too long despite not even being finished with the arch expansion.  No big, it’s a new technique and now there was plenty of knitting to get a really good gauge swatch.  I checked my gauge.  I checked my math.  I looked at the charts again (the book has a fantastic master chart that determines how many stitches to use based on any gauge and foot circumference and you use the row gauge to determine length).  Everything was right.  No matter.  I’ll just reduce the initial number of stitches from 46 to 42 (maybe my gauge is really more like 5.5 instead of 6 anyway after checking again) and reduce the toe length by an inch.  Yep, that ought to do it.  So I ripped out to the toe increases and began again.  It was still looking too long but I decided to see it through anyway. 

See the picture where the sock looks pretty decent on my foot and appears to have a “heel”?  Well, there is no heel.  That is just about the length of the sock when I had finished the arch expansion.  I went on a couple of rows after that doing some decreases thinking that it really didn’t fit too bad even without a heel and maybe I should just continue.  I just can’t quite convince myself though.  My decreases don’t fit with the existing architecture and besides that this yarn deserves a good sock!  A correct sock!  So what is a knitter to do?   I’m really not sure at this point.  Beginning again just isn’t going to work.  Despite the title, I am quite sure Cat Bordhi has not made a mistake.  There just has to be something simple that I am missing, doesn’t there?  I’m off to scope out some blogs get more information on successful Coriolises? Corioli?  If you know anything about this strange phenomena I’m having, please let me know!