First, the name. I see eight armed critters in these socks, and while octopodes may not be the most correct plural for the word ‘octopus’, it is certainly a fun plural. Also, I peeked ahead at some of the future patterns, and there’s another one that features a repeating octopus motif, so to differentiate the two I picked on the circle of dots in this one that reminds me of the circle of stars in the Betsy Ross American flag.
Second, this is my first pair of socks with an afterthought heel! I’ve been knitting socks for forever, and yet I haven’t been super adventurous with my sock construction. I like the way my socks fit as they are, and haven’t seen the need to try and fix what isn’t broken, particularly since my foot dimensions seem to require a fairly long heel flap to keep the socks from falling down all them time. For these socks, however, I wanted a smooth color transition all the way down the top of the sock, and I wanted the heel to be out of the colorful yarn. In this case, an afterthought heel is ideal, as the main body of the sock is knit first, with the same number of stitches, so that not only is the color transition smooth, it also keeps happening at the same rate (after a heel flap there are more stitches, so color transitions happen more quickly until the gusset is done). The afterthought heel worked just fine, and I took pictures at the various different steps.
The colorful yarn is Perth from the Queensland collection, and the white is a spool of 100% wool my mommy gave me for christmas. The two are much closer to the same weight than the black and rainbow was, so I plan to pair the rest of my Perth yarn with the white. Since it’s also thinner, I think I’m going to wait until the 16 stitch wide patterns (they start around #44?), and use 10 more stitches around, as these socks turned out rather narrow.
