I've been looking forward to this pattern for awhile, because it definitely looks like something! Barbara intended it to be crowns, but the first time I saw it I saw jellyfish. I was convinced to call them aliens instead though, as that way I could justify using rainbow colors, and the rainbow just contrasts so nicely with the black! Both yarns are Opal sock yarn.
I played around again with the heel on these, and I really like the fit, at least so far as trying them on to take pictures goes. I think that they feel really comfy though, and I might have to try wearing a pair with this heel on a regular basis and see what I think after that. The heel is a modification on the riverbed gusset. The heel flap consisted of 36 stitches, but I picked up 22 stitches on either side. After turning the heel, my heel flap had 22 stitches. I located the decreases on the two edge stitches from my heel flap. The first set of decreases (one on each side of the foot) I did into the picked up stitches, rather than into the turned heel flap stitches. The second set I did into the turned heel flap stitches, as is typical in a riverbed gusset. I continued alternating these two decrease rounds (with a row of plain knitting in between) 5 times, for a total of 10 decreases. This meant that I had 17 stitches after the decrease, but before the top of the sock. At this point I did a standard riverbed gusset until the two lines of decreases met, getting me back to 36 stitches across the bottom of the foot.
Doing the decreases this way means that my sock will lay flat on the table, and doesn't bunch up at the transition from heel flap to decreases, like I have happen if I just try starting the riverbed gusset higher up on the heel flap. Thus I can use longer heel flaps without having to resort to a second row of decreases-the double riverbed gusset we used on Stage 2. I have a pair of mindless socks I should be finishing soon where I did a double riverbed, and they just look very strange. On a foot they look fine, but I really believe that any form-fitting knitted object should look like the form it is going to fit before it is put on. Otherwise some parts of the knitting have to stretch more, so some of the yarn is under more tension, and, well... I've done research on fibers under tension for long periods of time, and spreading out the tension more evenly is invariably a better answer. I know my socks aren't going to fail first based on their tensile strength (unless someone is using them very strangely), but it still seems better to me to aim to have the sock look like a foot, even when it isn't on a foot. This has been my major reason for being resistant to trying various different types of heels, though I clearly am willing to fuss with where my decreases go after a heel flap!
Another thing I've learned, is that while light colors really need a purl in a little box to make it pop, I can get away with just knitting all my stitches if I'm using a dark color. I've done this on a few other socks, where if it's a light color that only appears for one stitch I will purl on the second pass, but if it's a dark color I simply knit. I do always purl the second stitch if it's a lighter color, ever since Mosaic 1 where I really had to prod the little pink dots to show up at all.
